Trade Roundtable

Abstract

The Doha round has been stalling for over 10 years now. It might not be ‘dead and loving it’ but definitely in moribund condition. Worse, there is no sign of reviving it, in the near future at least. The most optimistic scenario involves a re-engineering of the round after the US Presidential elections. There are so many uncertainties involved though that few, if any, would bet their money on it. More worrisome is probably the fact that major trading partners are looking into deals that would eviscerate even further the non-discrimination principle, the cornerstone of the WTO. Preferential trade agreements are multiplying at alarming speed: Obama was celebrating in Hawaii the Pacific deal two weeks before the Doha round was pronounced dead yet again last December; the EU has concluded a deal with Korea, is about to do so with Canada and India, and is also contemplating (or, at least has not rejected the idea) a deal with its transatlantic partner. And then, the plurilaterals: conceived as a means to break a deadlock caused by the single undertaking-approach, they could become the means to transform the WTO into an integration process with variable geometry. The talk of a services plurilateral is picking up speed and caused friction already in some quarters. With all this in mind, the High Level Policy Seminar “Trade Roundtable” (12 March 2012), organized within the Research Strand “International Trade” of the Global Governance Programme (GGP), aimed to address the possible ways, if any, to keep the Round alive. The memoranda presented during the seminar by the academics (featured in this publication) as well as the responses by the policy makers left us with little room for optimism. The WTO needs a reality check soon. And it will be painful, for it is not just the current round that is at stake, but its future relevance as well. Preferential trade agreements seem to run away with the trade agenda while the WTO is catching up its breath.