Publication: The Doha Development Agenda : What's on the Table?
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Published
2010
ISSN
09638199
Date
2012-03-30
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The outlines of a potential agreement, emerging after seven years of negotiations, imply that Doha offers three key potential benefits: reduced uncertainty of market access in goods and services; improved market access in agriculture and manufacturing; and the mobilization of resources to deal with the trade problems of least developed countries. WTO Members have offered to make large reductions in legally bound levels of protection in goods and services. The reductions in currently applied levels of protection are smaller. For the least developed countries, the proposed 'duty free and quota free' access will only add significantly to their access under existing preferential access arrangements if industrial and developing country members include vital tariff lines. The initiatives on trade facilitation and aid for trade can play a valuable catalytic role in promoting reform and mobilizing assistance, but substantial effort is still needed to translate notional benefits into actual gain.
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Publication The Doha Development Agenda : What's on the Table?(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-07)The outlines of a potential agreement, emerging after seven years of negotiations, imply that Doha offers three key benefits: reduced uncertainty of market access in goods and services; improved market access in agriculture and manufacturing; and the mobilization of resources to deal with the trade problems of least developed countries. WTO Members have offered to make large reductions in legally bound levels of protection in goods and services. The reductions in currently applied levels of protection are smaller. For the least developed countries, the proposed "duty free and quota free" access will only add significantly to their access under existing preferential access arrangements if industrial and developing country members include vital tariff lines. The initiatives on trade facilitation and aid for trade can play a valuable catalytic role in promoting reform and mobilizing assistance, but substantial effort is still needed to translate notional benefits into actual gain.Publication Services in Doha: What's on the Table?(2009)Services trade reform matters, but what is Doha doing about it? It has been hard to judge because of the opaqueness of services policies and the opaqueness of the request-offer negotiating process. This paper attempts to assess what is on the table. It presents the results of the first survey of applied trade policies in the major services sectors of fifty-six industrial and developing countries. These policies are then compared with these countries' Uruguay Round (UR) commitments in services and the best offers that they have made in the current Doha negotiations. The paper finds that at this stage, Doha promises greater security of access to markets but not any additional liberalization. Uruguay Round commitments are on average 2.3 times more restrictive than current policies. The best offers submitted so far as part of the Doha negotiations improve on Uruguay Round commitments by about 13% but remain on average 1.9 times more restrictive than actual policies. The World Trade Organization's (WTO's) Hong Kong Ministerial had set out ambitious goals for services, but the analysis here shows that much remains to be done to achieve them.Publication Services in Doha : What’s on the Table?(2009-04-01)Services trade reform matters, but what is Doha doing about it? It has been hard to judge, because of the opaqueness of services policies and the opaqueness of the request-offer negotiating process. This paper attempts to assess what is on the table. It presents the results of the first survey of applied trade policies in the major services sectors of 56 industrial and developing countries. These policies are then compared with these countries' Uruguay Round commitments in services and the best offers that they have made in the current Doha negotiations. The paper finds that at this stage, Doha promises greater security of access to markets but not any additional liberalization. Uruguay Round commitments are on average 2.3 times more restrictive than current policies. The best offers submitted so far as part of the Doha negotiations improve on Uruguay Round commitments by about 13 percent but remain on average 1.9 times more restrictive than actual policies. The World Trade Organization's Hong Kong Ministerial had set out ambitious goals for services but the analysis here shows that much remains to be done to achieve them.Publication From Doha to the Next Bretton Woods : A New Multilateral Trade Agenda(2009)Trade problems are an underlying cause of the financial crisis. To truly revive the world economy, a new trade consensus is necessary.Publication Conclude Doha : It Matters!(2009-11-01)The Doha Round must be concluded not because it will produce dramatic liberalization but because it will create greater security of market access. Its conclusion would strengthen, symbolically and substantively, the WTO s valuable role in restraining protectionism in the current downturn. What is on the table would constrain the scope for tariff protection in all goods, ban agricultural export subsidies in the industrial countries and sharply reduce the scope for distorting domestic support - by 70 per cent in the EU and 60 per cent in the US. Average farm tariffs that exporters face would fall to 12 per cent (from 14.5 per cent) and the tariffs on exports of manufactures to less than 2.5 per cent (from about 3 per cent). There are also environmental benefits to be captured, in particular disciplining the use of subsidies that encourage over-fishing and lowering tariffs on technologies that can help mitigate global warming. An agreement to facilitate trade by cutting red tape will further expand trade opportunities. Greater market access for the least-developed countries will result from the "duty free and quota free" proposal and their ability to take advantage of new opportunities will be enhanced by the Doha-related "aid for trade" initiative. Finally, concluding Doha would create space for multilateral cooperation on critical policy matters that lie outside the Doha Agenda, most urgently the trade policy implications of climate change mitigation.
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