An Analytical Framework for Further Research
If the Doha Round proceeds in the same way as its predecessor, informing the negotiating process with research results will not be easy. The Uruguay Round made erratic progress. A Draft Final Act had been produced by the end of 1991, but the agricultural proposals were rejected by the European Union (EU) (Croome 1995: 328). There followed two years in which most of the “action” took place in bilateral talks between the EU and the United States (USA) from which other states were largely excluded. Even when the formal negotiations were re-launched in July 1993, there were at least three tracks: the discussion in the formal General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) groups; the personal “facilitating” of the new GATT Director General, Peter Sutherland, who ‘kept up a punishing series of whirlwind visits to top-level political leaders in the major countries’ (Croome 1995: 349), and bilateral negotiations between the EU and USA, with their respective chief negotiators, Sir Leon Brittan and Mickey Kantor, having from November ‘a crucial series of meetings ... that were to continue with only short breaks over a period of more than three weeks’ (Croome 1995: 364).
The Role of International and National Agencies in Trade-Related Capacity Building
With increased recognition that trade can bring significant benefits to developing countries, and the launch of a new trade round, bilateral and multilateral agencies have begun to mobilise resources for trade-related capacity building (TRCB). The biggest challenge is to ensure that available resources are effectively utilised to deliver tangible benefits to developing countries. This paper argues that the effective delivery of TRCB relates specifically to two areas: in-country to help formulate appropriate trade positions as well as to place trade reform in the context of the country's overall development strategy that will promote a supply response and facilitate pro-poor growth; and secondly within the global rule making process to ensure that implementation of WTO rules and efforts to negotiate and implement future disciplines makes sense from a development perspective, and that TRCB is considered in the context of other competing development needs. The paper elaborates an issues based approach to bring the main providers to TRCB and bilateral donors together to support recipient countries to include a trade agenda in their overall development strategy and to facilitate developing country participation and implementation of WTO agreements that could be formulated within the global trade rules. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2002.
Special and Differential Treatment in the WTO: Why, When and How?
This paper analyses to which extent domestic institutions affect trade flows. We use two complementary approaches, one focusing on the size of total trade flows and one focusing on bilateral trade patterns (gravity equation). Besides, we control for two other domestic policy variables: trade policy and domestic infrastructure. We find that the quality of institutions has a positive and significant impact on a country's level of openness. Domestic tariffs have no statistically significant impact on their own, but do affect total trade flows when combined with good institutions. Domestic institutions also have a positive and significant impact on bilateral trade flows, but the parameter of our institution variables is reduced by almost a half and may turn insignificant when the quality of domestic infrastructure is included in the regression.