Peter Gallagher

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 end will come in a rush bring­ing con­fu­sion for many includ­ing the Pacific Islands, most of Africa and even some ASEANs.
#(relaxed) The over­all shape of the WTO deals on *agri­cul­ture and ser­vices* will not change much: but there’ll be a lot of obscure bar­gains made to con­trol imports in ‘sen­si­tive’ and ‘spe­cial’ mar­kets in both sec­tors. Indus­tries that start early in 2006 to iden­tify traps and loop­holes in the all-important sched­ules will have the advan­tage.
#(relaxed) Food *health and safety (quar­an­tine) bar­ri­ers* will loom larger than ever in world trade thanks to fears about the spread of epi­zootic dis­ease (includ­ing ‘bird flu’). These bar­ri­ers rep­re­sent an enor­mous threat to to mar­kets because few gov­ern­ments man­age them in a ratio­nal way based on a cost-benefit assess­ment of risk mit­i­ga­tion strate­gies.
#(relaxed) Trade fric­tion with the USA will grow, but *China* is still likely to jump to sec­ond on the trade ranks because the resur­gent *Japan­ese econ­omy* will spur con­tin­u­ing growth—as well as offer­ing renewed oppor­tu­ni­ties for Aus­tralia. The Aus­tralian ‘FTA fea­si­blilty’ study with Japan won’t lead to an FTA but will iden­tify sev­eral ways to expand invest­ment and the com­po­si­tion of our trade includ­ing in ser­vices and food.
#(relaxed) *Indone­sia* has new, com­pe­tent eco­nomic man­age­ment to go with the strongest real GDP growth out­look in ASEAN; infla­tion threat­ens, but cor­rup­tion appears less and the gov­ern­ment is man­ag­ing secu­rity prob­lems more adroitly. Domes­tic con­fi­dence will vis­i­bly improve. It’s time to recon­sider Indone­sian mar­ket strate­gies.
#(relaxed) Gov­ern­ments will stum­ble badly in the “new” *cli­mate change debate* over the ques­tion of what are we will­ing to pay for the ben­e­fits of adap­tion to higher tem­per­a­tures and reduc­tion of green­house gas emis­sions. Some will again endorse mit­i­ga­tion plans that cost much more than they are worth; oth­ers will take a bet, at very long odds, that a mar­ket price (for car­bon emis­sions) will be suf­fi­cient incen­tive for a tech­no­log­i­cal solution.