Why the WTO Doha Round Talks Have Collapsed – and a Path Forward [3]
论文作者:佚名论文属性:短文 essay登出时间:2009-06-17编辑:anne点击率:11176
论文字数:2130论文编号:org200906171618059765语种:英语 English地区:英格兰价格:免费论文
关键词:WTOPath Forwardglobal economysocial“neoliberalism”Bush administration’s
aces, the bottom-up public pressure that has altered trade politics in many nations has not risen to a level in the United States that translates into significantly altered negotiating positions. Thus, while a majority of the U.S. public is losing under the Bush administration’s trade agenda, the U.S. WTO position continues to be that of the narrow commercial interests that have bankrolled the administration’s campaigns and those of the Republican majority in Congress. That’s why efforts of the newly launched Citizens’ Trade Campaign Political Action Committee (CTC PAC - www.citizenstrade.org/political-action.php) to hold elected officials accountable for their trade votes on recent bilateral and regional agreements with Oman and Central America are crucial to changing the future of U.S. trade policy, and hence the future prosperity and well-being of workers and farmers in the United States and globally.
Meager Projected Doha Round Gains for a Few and Net Losses for Many
The Doha Round was dubbed a “Development Round.” However, the actual texts reveal an agenda aimed at expanding the scope of the existing WTO regime. Given the record of the WTO decade, proponents of the Doha Round agenda sought to change the debate away from the WTO’s performance and onto prospective future gains. While initial projections by the World Bank were $832 billion, more recent World Bank studies based on revised analysis found extremely limited possible gains from a “Doha Round” overall. The most likely Doha scenario the World Bank reviewed would yield benefits of only $54 billion to the world by 2015, with developing countries receiving a meager 16 percent of those gains. These projections amount to a miniscule 0.14 percent of projected developing country GDP by that year, or about 0.23 percent of world GDP. Put another way, it is a little less than one cent per person per day to the developing world, or about four cents per person per day to the world as a whole.
Worse, the new research revealed that under the “likely” Doha scenario, the Middle East, Bangladesh, much of Africa and (notably) Mexico would actually face net losses. These studies also showed that the alleged gains that are projected to accrue to Brazil and India would be largely concentrated in those countries’ agribusiness and manufacturing industries respectively, while subsistence farmers – a much, much larger percentage of those populations – would see tiny gains or net losses.
There are several key problems with the studies, however, in that they project gains from agriculture and goods liberalization without taking into account many costs of Doha implementation. First of all, the economic models used in the studies “assume full employment.” That means they capture alleged savings on consumer food prices as gains, but fail to show a loss if millions of subsistence farmers, who represent nearly half of the developing world, lose their livelihoods. In addition, they fail to include the increased costs that consumers worldwide pay for medicines due to pharmaceutical monopolies, which some economists estimate outweigh the projected gains, even for the few developing country “winners.” And finally, the models fail to adequately take into account the loss in tariff revenue for developing countries, which the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development estimated would be 2 to 4 times the projected gains for developing countries from the Doha WTO expansion. These flaws have
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