Two tracks out of the Doha wasteland?

The Doha nego­ti­a­tions are mori­bund because they’ve been poi­soned by their own intestines. The guts of the deal is in the so-called ‘modal­i­ties’: now a knot­ty mass of rules for cut­ting bar­ri­ers, rules for com­pen­sat­ing the bar­ri­er cuts, rules for mak­ing excep­tions to the bar­ri­er cuts, and­pro­vi­sions adding excep­tions to the excep­tions. They add-up to hun­dreds of pages includ­ing gob­bledy-gook so impen­e­tra­ble that most gov­ern­ments have no idea what it will mean for actu­al imports and exports. That’s a major rea­son the talks have ground to a halt.

Worse, it’s not hard to see that in sev­er­al ways this minute­ly-struc­tured deal pro­longs and con­sol­i­dates the con­ta­gion of tai­lor-made pro­tec­tion that it was sup­posed to remedy.

A much more effec­tive ‘two track’ solu­tion would be to allow the WTO mem­ber coun­tries to ‘self select’ into two groups. One group would bring togeth­er coun­tries that want­ed to open glob­al mar­kets open com­pe­ti­tion and high­er growth with few­er gov­ern­ment tax­es and sub­si­dies. They would try to nego­ti­ate a rec­i­p­ro­cal deal to open mar­kets on a non-dis­crim­i­na­to­ry basis.

The oth­er group, includ­ing many devel­op­ing coun­tries such as India that don’t want to open their mar­kets and see the WTO rules as a pro­tec­tion for their trade auton­o­my (they are that, too), would not nego­ti­ate. But nei­ther would they have the right to impose unwieldy, com­plex, recidi­vist con­di­tions on the deal made by the first group.

I have recent­ly been work­ing on the out­lines of just such a two-track deal using a non-dis­crim­i­na­to­ry form of a kind of trade deal known as a ‘crit­i­cal mass’ agree­ment. I’ve been mod­el­ing the out­comes of some pos­si­ble deals and com­par­ing them to a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of what could come out of Doha as it is present­ly struc­tured. As part of the mod­el­ing, I have con­struct­ed some lists of the devel­op­ing coun­try groups that have extract­ed var­i­ous addi­tion­al excep­tions and concessions—beyond the ‘spe­cial and dif­fer­en­tial’ con­ces­sions made to the entire devel­op­ing coun­try group—including the right to make no changes to their trade barriers.

As an exam­ple of the bizarre con­tor­tions that these excep­tions process­es have includ­ed, note that the sec­ond-biggest econ­o­my in Africa and the biggest oil-pro­duc­er on the African con­ti­nent, Nige­ria, has been offered the ‘small and vul­ner­a­ble’ des­ig­na­tion (foot­note 11 of the cur­rent Agri­cul­ture ‘modal­i­ties’).

LDC no cuts	Small& Vul­ner­a­ble much small­er cuts	Recent­ly Acced­ed Mem­bers (RAMS) small­er and post­poned cuts	Very Recent­ly Acced­ed no cuts
Ango­la	Alba­nia	Alba­nia	Sau­di Arabia
Bangladesh	Antigua and Barbuda	Arme­nia	FYR Mace­do­nia
Benin	Arme­nia	Bul­gar­ia	Viet Nam
Burk­i­na Faso	Bar­ba­dos	Chi­na	Ton­ga
Burun­di	Belize	Croa­t­ia	Ukraine
Cam­bo­dia	Bolivia	Ecuador
Cen­tral African Republic	Botswana	FYR Mace­do­nia
Chad	Brunei Darus­salam	Jor­dan
Con­go	Cameroon	Kyr­gyz Rep.
Dji­bouti	Cuba	Moldo­va
Gam­bia	Domini­ca	Mon­go­lia
Guinea	Domini­can Rep.	Oman
Guinea Bis­sau	Ecuador	Pana­ma
Haiti	El Sal­vador	Sau­di Arabia
Lesotho	Fiji	Chi­nese Taipei
Mada­gas­car	FYR Mace­do­nia
Malawi	Gabon
Mal­dives	Geor­gia
Mali	Ghana
Mau­ri­ta­nia	Grena­da
Mozam­bique	Guatemala
Myan­mar	Guyana
Nepal	Hon­duras
Niger	Jamaica
Rwan­da	Jor­dan
Sene­gal	Kenya
Sier­ra Leone	Kyr­gyzs­tan
Solomon Islands	Macao, Chi­na
Tan­za­nia	Mau­ri­tius
Togo	Moldo­va
Ugan­da	Mon­go­lia
Zam­bia	Namib­ia
	Nicaragua
	Nige­ria
	Pana­ma
	Papua New Guinea
	Paraguay
	St Kitts and Nevis
	St Lucia
	St Vin­cent & the Grenadines
	Sri Lan­ka
	Suri­name
	Swazi­land
	Trinidad and Tobago
	Uruguay
	Zim­bab­we