Peter Gallagher

As of Sat­ur­day 16, there was lit­tle con­sen­sus inside the Hong Kong Con­fer­ence Cen­ter as you can read from the press cov­er­age, except that the Euro­pean Community’s nego­ti­at­ing posi­tion is unac­cept­able to every­one else. The atmos­phere is poi­so­nous and the dis­cus­sions, even in the small­est and most senior infor­mal groups (the ‘green room’ meet­ings orga­nized by Direc­tor Gen­eral Lamy) are can best be described as ‘piss­ing matches’, accord­ing to my infor­mants. I am attend­ing a mar­ginal meet­ing on the WTO legal sys­tem: notes for my talk (“Obser­va­tions on the first decade of WTO”) are over the fold …

Ten obser­va­tions: Some, pos­si­bly provoca­tive, ideas that were not included in WTO: the First Ten Years . It’s the ‘mar­ket access’ agenda … for now

• The sin­gle under­tak­ing keeps WTO from spin­ning apart
• There is no ‘devel­op­ment agenda’
• WTO is more open than its crit­ics allow
• The sys­tem would be more trans­par­ent if the Mem­bers were more open
• WTO tech­ni­cal assis­tance is effec­tive, but
• Acces­sion price-inflation is a sig­nif­i­cant problem
• Dis­pute set­tle­ment works well: effec­tive and not legislative
• The biggest chal­lenges for trad­ing busi­nesses lie beyond WTO’s remit
• The sys­tem needs regional trade agreements

1. The WTO had a lot of weight in its sad­dle­bags as soon as it jumped from the gate. It was weighed down with con­tin­u­ing nego­ti­a­tions on the most dif­fi­cult parts of the GATS nego­ti­a­tions: on finan­cial ser­vices, telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions and a pro­posal for a global zero tar­iff regime on high-tech prod­ucts. Right from the out­set many of the devel­op­ing coun­try mem­bers of new orga­ni­za­tion began to ques­tion the bal­ance, rel­e­vance or even the pur­pose of the oblig­a­tions in the agree­ments in the inter­minable debate on ‘imple­men­ta­tion issues’ . The indus­tri­al­ized coun­tries, were headed in the oppo­site direc­tion, seek­ing to extend the reach of the treaties to cover com­pe­ti­tion pol­icy and invest­ment. Although the Mem­bers quickly dropped pro­pos­als for nego­ti­a­tions on envi­ron­ment and labour stan­dards, by the time of the first WTO Min­is­te­r­ial Con­fer­ence in Sin­ga­pore (1996), the weight of the ‘high pol­icy agenda’ of some indus­tri­al­ized coun­tries was slow­ing progress; to a spec­tac­u­lar halt at Seat­tle and again at Can­cun. By the end of 2003, it was finally clear that WTO had to ditch these ambi­tions and ‘stick to its knit­ting’; the ‘mar­ket access agenda’ as then–USTR Zoel­lick called it in a let­ter to trade min­is­ters. The Doha round is now strug­gling, once more, with some­thing like the ‘clas­sic’ objec­tives of trade bar­ri­ers and sub­si­dies. There are prospects of only mod­est suc­cess and