Deflation Defies Expectations—and Solutions
26 de julho de 2010Empresa pode perder concessão por sonegação, cartel e lavagem de dinheiro
30 de julho de 2010Long-running talks to open up world trade are showing tentative signs of movement after months of deadlock, trade officials and negotiators said on Tuesday.
A deal in the World Trade Organization’s 8-1/2-year-old Doha round is still far off, but informal small-group contacts between big players like the United States, European Union, China, Brazil and India suggest one could at least be possible. “After some months of impasse in the negotiations, my own sense is that we are beginning to see signs of a new dynamic emerging,” WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy said.
It is too soon for the WTO’s 153 members to start thinking about “horizontal trade-offs” — the final stage in the talks where one country offers a concession in one area, say agriculture, for gains in another, like manufacturing, he told the global trade umpire’s Trade Negotiations Committee.
But if the creative work in the small groups continues, side by side with the formal negotiations, it could soon be time for countries to start testing such possibilities against each other, Lamy said, calling for a review of progress on the talks in mid-October before November’s G20 summit in Seoul.
Most of the speakers at the meeting, rich and poor, welcomed the small-group format, but said that any final deal had to be agreed by all members in formal talks.
NEW AREAS OF DISCUSSION
Lamy’s comments were the latest hint that the deadlocked talks are starting to move again. On July 16, U.S. industry lobbyists said trade is moving up the U.S. political agenda and there is scope to reach a deal next year.
The talks were launched in late 2001 to free up world commerce and help poor countries prosper through trade.
Estimates of the value of a deal vary. One study last month by Washington’s Peterson Institute for International Economics says it could boost global GDP by $283 billion or 0.5 percent a year.
But since their launch in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the talks have missed deadline after deadline.
They are now stuck over differences between the United States, which is calling on the big fast-growing emerging economies like China, Brazil and India to do more to open their markets, and those countries themselves who say the Doha round must help developing countries with their millions of subsistence farmers and poor workers.
For the past 8-1/2 years the talks have focussed on the core areas of agriculture and industrial goods, with the bigger developing countries asked to cut tariffs on manufactured products in return for rich nations reducing their trade-distorting subsidies on farm produce and opening up their agricultural markets by cutting tariffs there.
But those talks have gone more or less as far as they can, leaving several stubborn areas which will require compromises by political leaders for a deal. The recent small group talks have tried to break this deadlock by seeking out agreement in other areas where negotiations are less advanced, in the hope that progress there could encourage flexibility in other areas.
These include development-related questions, fisheries, services such as banking and telecoms, and environmental goods and services.
At Wednesday’s meeting developing countries such as Zambia complained that delays in completing a Doha deal were condemning poor countries to further poverty, and welcomed the effort to find answers in the small-group format.
Other smaller countries such as Taiwan said it was important that they were not left out of discussions with deals being cut in closed meetings.
