• Re:The Doha Round: “Death-Defying Agenda” or “Don’t Do it Again”?

Good summary, which however fails to deal with the question of fairness. This point is dismissed by stating that the developing countries would stand most to lose from a failure to conclude the Doha Round. But is this so? Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stigliz rightly concludes his book "Fair Trade for All" as follows:
"Adjustment to a post-Doha trading regime will be disproportionately costly and difficult for developing countries because of the loss of preference margins, the loss of revenue from trade taxes, institutional weaknesses including the absence of adequate safety nets, large implementation costs, lack of finance required to restructure the economy, and the limited ability of poor populations to manage short-term unemployment......In the absence of a significant increase in international assistance, responsibility for these (adjustment) policies will fall on resource constrained domestic governments, and trade reform (if it is pursued at all) will come at the expense of other development policies. As a result, even a development-oriented round of liberalization may fail to produce the growth benefits promised by the advocates of a new trade agreement." The mistake was to call Doha a Round that would cater for the interests of developing countries without doing so. If one cannot change course, the Round deserves to fail.

By Corrado Pirzio-Biroli on10/10/200913:50