Author Archives: pwg

A bearish view of global governance

If there were a rat­ings agency for the cred­i­bil­ity of “global gov­er­nance” insti­tu­tions, the WTO’s would have been down­graded to a “B” at best[1] after the col­lapse of the Doha Round nego­ti­a­tions. The triple crown of benign global gov­er­nance — a pros­per­ous, well-regulated global “com­mons,” the sov­er­eignty of nation-states and the assent of the gov­erned …

January 22, 2012 – 9:21 am | By pwg | Posted in Ideas, Trade | Tagged , | Comments (0)

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)

The unanswered question about 9–11

Robert Fisk is such a reward­ing his­to­rian of inter­na­tional pol­icy because his con­tacts are so broad and his expe­ri­ence is so long and because he writes so clearly, pas­sion­ately and thought­fully about the per­sis­tent fail­ures of West­ern policy—and humanity—in the Mid­dle East. There, the UK, France and the United States directly or through their occa­sional …

September 4, 2011 – 8:55 am | By pwg | Posted in Foreign policy, Ideas | Tagged , | Comments (0)

That High Court decision

The Prime Min­is­ter is “deeply dis­ap­pointed” with the deci­sion on the plan to send Christ­mas Island arrivals to Malaysia. Under­stand­able; it’s not a good look for her gov­ern­ment. But is Paul Kelly in the Aus­tralian right to argue that the deci­sion was ill-made and an “unjus­ti­fied” inter­fer­ence in for­eign pol­icy? This is cer­tainly an “intru­sive” …

September 2, 2011 – 9:39 am | By pwg | Posted in Foreign policy, Public policy | Tagged , | Comments (0)