Monthly Archives: December 2005

Google wool

A zeit­geist is a spirit of the times. “Google”:http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist2005.html can, prob­a­bly, pre­tend to mea­sure it, at least for a large pro­por­tion of peo­ple in Europe, the Amer­i­cas and parts of Asia using the sub­ject of queries to it’s data­bases as a proxy. But oddly, they chooseonly to pre­tend to tell us what it is. For …

December 27, 2005 – 8:24 pm | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Comments (0)

Ten observations about the WTO’s first decade

As of Sat­ur­day 16, there was lit­tle con­sen­sus inside the Hong Kong Con­fer­ence Cen­ter as you can read from the press cov­er­age, except that the Euro­pean Community’s nego­ti­at­ing posi­tion is unac­cept­able to every­one else. The atmos­phere is poi­so­nous and the dis­cus­sions, even in the small­est and most senior infor­mal groups (the ‘green room’ meet­ings orga­nized …

December 18, 2005 – 12:15 pm | By pwg | Posted in Trade | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

A few days in Hong Kong

I will be speak­ing at an “aca­d­e­mic conference”:http://www.ictsd.org/ministerial/hongkong/tds/agenda/ in Hong Kong on Fri­day at the invi­ta­tion of Prof Henry Gao at Hong Kong Uni­ver­sity. My talk will be based on “WTO: The First Ten Years”:http://www.inquit.com/wto-the-first-ten-years which appeared a week or so back. It will be good to catch up with many friends who will also …

December 15, 2005 – 9:33 pm | By pwg | Posted in Trade | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Predictions for 2006

Some of my guesses for trade and pub­lic pol­icy out­comes next year h4. A few pre­dic­tions for 2006 #(relaxed) The WTO nego­ti­a­tions will con­clude in Geneva in the third quar­ter, barely leav­ing time to cre­ate and ver­ify a hundred-thousand pages of com­mit­ment sched­ules before the US nego­ti­at­ing author­ity expires. After five years of talks, the …

December 12, 2005 – 11:24 am | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

WTO seen from the banks of the Zambezi

A great “report”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/53fcfb32-65fe-11da-8f40-0000779e2340.html from Alan Beat­tie of the frus­tra­tions of Dipak Patel, the Zam­bian Min­is­ter for Trade, try­ing to man­age the inter­ests of a least-developed African econ­omy in the global trad­ing sys­tem Beat­tie’ report is full of accu­rately observed detail, not just about the sar­cas­tic Patel’s des­per­ate lack of resources but also about the hope­lessly …

December 12, 2005 – 7:38 am | By pwg | Posted in Trade | Tagged , , | Comments (0)