Category Archives: Trade

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)

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)

Manufacturing dissent

United States man­u­fac­tur­ers, like their Aus­tralian coun­ter­parts, are indulging some hyper­bolic alarm about their future, but for dif­fer­ent rea­sons. U.S. eco­nomic growth seems too anaemic to sup­port demand in the sec­tor; Australia’s eco­nomic growth seem to be bypass­ing it. Still, this self-interested plea in the NYT from a direc­tor of GE for pub­lic sub­si­dies (“inno­va­tion …

August 31, 2011 – 11:56 am | By pwg | Posted in Public policy, Trade | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

The canker in quarantine policies

No, it’s not the bit­ter reac­tion from the apple and pear lobby to the end of our century-long ban on apple imports from NZ. What else could we expect: thanks to the price (and qual­ity) pro­tec­tion afford by the ban, uncom­pet­i­tive pro­duc­ers in those indus­tries have been ripping-off the con­sumer so long we could hardly …

August 31, 2011 – 9:05 am | By pwg | Posted in Public policy, Trade | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Eminent call-girls

Aaargh! Yet another knee-jerk call in the Finan­cial Times for “wise” men (and women) to guide WTO out of it’s slough. Third, in lieu of the WTO min­is­te­r­ial, a group of emi­nent peo­ple should be appointed with the task find­ing a way out of the cur­rent dol­drums and out­lin­ing future courses of action. The head …

August 29, 2011 – 10:11 am | By pwg | Posted in Trade | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Competition policy in PTAs

Here’s a surprise…or is it? Accord­ing to the WTO’s 2011 annual report, the most com­mon WTO-extension (WTO-X) pro­vi­sion of pref­er­en­tial trade agree­ments (PTAs) is in a domain that the WTO dropped from its nego­ti­at­ing agenda in 2003: com­pe­ti­tion pol­icy. Research for the WTO’s 2011 Annual Report shows that 90 of the 96 PTAs exam­ined have …

July 29, 2011 – 9:52 am | By pwg | Posted in Trade | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

WTO embraces the irresistible

WTO’s annual World Trade Report for 2011 sig­nals a turning-point for the soon-to-be-Doha-less Orga­ni­za­tion. It attempts to pro­vide a ratio­nale for aban­don­ing WTO’s half-hostile stand-off with the more dynamic uni­verse of pref­er­en­tial trade agree­ments (PTAs) and for embrac­ing PTAs instead. Or, as the sub­ti­tle of the report puts it, in EU-ese, a ratio­nale for mov­ing …

July 27, 2011 – 8:06 am | By pwg | Posted in Trade | Tagged , , | Comments (0)