Monthly Archives: August 2005

Developing country interest in agriculture negotiations

Devel­op­ing coun­tries that stand back from full par­tic­i­pa­tion in trade reforms in the cur­rent round of trade nego­ti­a­tions are only short-changing them­selves and other devel­op­ing coun­tries. That was the mes­sage I offered to a ‘round table’ between the National Farm­ers’ Fed­er­a­tion and Oxfam Aus­tralia in Can­berra last week. I’ve included my notes and pre­sen­ta­tion below Among …

August 26, 2005 – 10:18 pm | By pwg | Posted in Trade | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

The thunderer lets fly

The NY Times blasts trans-Atlantic trade poli­cies: “Lis­ten­ing to these two [EU and USA] eco­nomic pow­er­houses snipe about who should be doing what is revolt­ing; nei­ther is doing any­thing real.” The paper is right, of course: the agri­cul­tural sup­port and pro­tec­tion poli­cies of the EC, Japan and the USA—not to men­tion India (the edi­to­r­ial doesn’t)—are …

August 23, 2005 – 9:49 am | By pwg | Posted in Trade | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Hiccup

My apolo­gies for the mys­te­ri­ous error mes­sage that appeared on this page over the past 36 hours or so. All fixed? With the web, you never know …

August 13, 2005 – 9:07 am | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Comments (0)

The ‘swoosh’ of trade policy

The Glob­al­iza­tion Insi­tute, a newly-minted, self-described ‘Cob­den­ite’ group in Lon­don has pub­lished it’s sec­ond paper in which Dr Razeen Sally—described, by the Institute’s pub­li­cist, as “Europe’s most senior trade economist”—presents his pre­scrip­tions for “the future of trade, devel­op­ment and inter­na­tional insti­tu­tions”. Just do it is Dr Sally’s rec­om­men­da­tion to gov­ern­ments on trade lib­er­al­iza­tion; an unfor­tu­nately …

August 10, 2005 – 10:28 pm | By pwg | Posted in Trade | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

I podcast

Cour­tesy of James Reese, of radioeconomics.com, 10 min­utes or so “viva voce”:http://radioeconomics.com/2005/08/interview-peter-gallagher-trade-and.html on the sub­jects of trade advo­cacy, bor­ders, bar­gain­ing and the myth­i­cal 800-pound gorilla

August 10, 2005 – 7:19 pm | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Comments (0)

Who is to blame for the slow pace in WTO?

The out-going Direc­tor Gen­eral of WTO has called for more direct exchange between ‘deci­sion mak­ers’, claim­ing that the lack of deci­sion over the past month is due to defen­sive­ness on the part of Geneva-based diplo­mats. But it’s not the diplo­mats who set the pace of WTO nego­ti­a­tions. Gov­ern­ments aren’t mov­ing quickly because they are not …

August 7, 2005 – 10:53 am | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Comments (0)

Court TV comes to WTO

A Panel ses­sion with the par­ties to the lat­est dis­pute in the long-running beef hor­mones dis­pute will be tele­vised. This is the first time that a WTO dis­putes pro­ce­dure has been opened to non-participants and to the pub­lic The Chair of the Panel has writ­ten to the WTO Sec­re­tariat, order­ing thein­no­va­tion bq.  With regard to …

August 5, 2005 – 5:00 pm | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Comments (0)