Peter Gallagher

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 be in Hong Kong but—alas—there is no rea­son to dis­agree much with this skep­ti­cal assess­ment from The Econ­o­mist of the state of the Doha nego­ti­a­tions at the begin­ning of the Min­is­te­r­ial meet­ing I don’t agree with the authors about the empha­sis … but that’s a quib­ble in view of the broader malaise fac­ing the nego­ti­a­tions: bq. “The Doha round has always been very unlikely to end in fully free trade. Yet even by more mod­est stan­dards, it has ended up with the wrong empha­sis. Worse, it has been plagued by a lack of ambi­tion on the part of the poor as much as the rich.”(“Economist.com”:http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=5297986&fsrc=RSS) PS. For any read­ers of this web­site who are in Hong Kong and would like to catch up, I am stay­ing at the Ramada Hong Kong. Please leave a mes­sage and I’ll get back to you. Or, if you know my Aus­tralian mobile phone num­ber, that should work too.