Peter Gallagher

At present, I’m on the road (‘in the air’?) to Nairobi for a ‘Busi­ness For Devel­op­ment’ con­fer­ence spon­sored by the UNCTAD-WTO Inter­na­tional Trade Cen­ter. I’ll be dis­uc­ss­ing mar­ket access nego­ti­a­tions on non-agricultural prod­ucts with a group of senior African offi­cials and busi­ness lead­ers. Indi­ca­tions from a pre­lim­i­nary email-conference are that many African busi­ness orga­ni­za­tions don’t …

This is the death cer­tifi­cate (or should be) of the forty year-old Mul­ti­fi­bre Agree­ment quan­ti­ta­tive restric­tions on imports of tex­tiles and gar­ments into Aus­tria, Canada, Fin­land, EC, Nor­way, USA (Swe­den and Japan no longer have quo­tas). bq. Pur­suant to Arti­cle 2 of the Agree­ment on Tex­tiles and Cloth­ing (ATC), I have the hon­our to notify …

The Finan­cial Times “reports(link to Sub­scrip­tion page on the FT site)”:http://www.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1079419901331&p=1012571727102 [sub] that the USA has lost a case on inter­net gam­bling brought by Antigua and Bar­buda. The Car­ribbean states claimed that the USA must, under its own sched­ule of com­mit­ments on ser­vices trade, allow off-shore casi­nos access to cus­tomers that is equiv­a­lent to the …

It pays to look crit­i­cally at analo­gies between the way we man­age con­flicts in munic­i­pal law and the man­age­ment of con­flicts between gov­ern­ments over trade poli­cies. Although micro-economic con­cepts trans­late well from the inter­ac­tion of indi­vid­u­als to the inter­ac­tion of ‘sov­er­eigns’ the legal par­al­lels are much weaker than they seem. I share “John Quiggin’s view”:http://www.johnquiggin.com/archives/001598.html …

Two-thirds of anti-dumping cases launched since the end of the Uruguay Round of WTO trade nego­ti­a­tions have been tar­get­ted at devel­op­ing coun­tries (about 15% of all actions against China alone). If you count the Rep. of Korea as a devel­op­ing coun­try the pro­por­tion of cases launched against devel­op­ing coun­tries jumps to almost three-quarters. But devel­op­ing …

Over the past week I’ve been back in Dakha and Chit­tagong to par­tic­i­pate in work­shops with the Chan­m­bers of Com­merce in both cities. While I was in Chit­tagong, the annual trade fair was com­ing to a close: I man­aged a vist on the last evening. A woman tries on ban­gles at the Chit­tagong trade fair …

Reports of Pres­i­dent Bush’s speech sound like the sort of thing you wish he’d been not only say­ing but doing con­sis­tently for the past four years … bq. Wednesday’s robustly worded speech was aimed at per­suad­ing vot­ers that eco­nomic open­ness had been a source of the country’s growth and pros­per­ity, and that Demo­c­ra­tic efforts to …