Monthly Archives: December 2011

A miracle on Lake Léman?

Geoff Kit­ney in today’s AFR wants you to believe Mark Emer­son has “res­cued the Doha round of trade nego­ti­a­tions from col­lapse” by con­vinc­ing all other Mem­bers to adopt his/Julia’s plan to “keep the talks alive”. Con­trast that breath­less dis­patch with this from Reuters: “WTO Meet­ing Ends with No Move For­ward on Doha”. Or how about this …

December 19, 2011 – 7:55 pm | By pwg | Posted in Trade | Comments (0)

WTO Whimpers

This weekend’s WTO Min­is­te­r­ial meet­ing in Geneva was unable to agree on how to keep goods and ser­vices mar­kets open to trade and com­pe­ti­tion. That’s no sur­prise, after ten years of repeated fail­ure to agree. Nor is it a cat­a­stro­phe given that for­mal bar­ri­ers are being held in check (more or less), for now, despite …

December 19, 2011 – 9:21 am | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Comments (0)

The mildness of global warming

I don’t doubt any more than you do that the aver­age atmos­pheric tem­per­a­ture has jumped around a lot but over­all has risen a few tenths of a degree in the past cen­tury or so. But when you see the change in con­text there’s just no basis for alarm, or for Aus­tralia to endorse the IPCC’s …

December 15, 2011 – 8:27 am | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Comments (0)

Irresitsible engines

Glen Steven’s ques­tions, in his inau­gural War­ren Hogan lec­ture, about the expec­ta­tion of emerg­ing Asia — that they will assume a promi­nent role shap­ing and direct­ing the global finan­cial sys­tem — and about the readi­ness of the West to cede that role to them have been tested in the WTO. So far, they remain unan­swered there… …

December 9, 2011 – 7:37 am | By pwg | Posted in Foreign policy, Trade | Tagged , , | Comments (0)