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Can the WTO be saved? PS - does it really matter?

Crawford School of Public Policy | Arndt-Corden Department of Economics

Event details

ACDE Seminar

Date & time

Tuesday 10 March 2015
2.00pm–3.30pm

Venue

Coombs Seminar Room B, HC Coombs Building 9, Cnr Fellows Road and Garran Road, ANU

Speaker

Malcolm Bosworth and Greg Cutbush, Academic visitors, Crawford School.

Contacts

Arianto Patunru
6125 9786

The World Trade Organization (WTO) and the multilateral trading system that it administers are in deep trouble, to say the least. The collapse of the Doha Round in particular highlights the extent of its decline. After 10 years Doha has failed - the first Round to do so absolutely. The WTO is verging on becoming irrelevant and a relic of past decades when it usefully contributed to global liberalisation and a multilateral non-discriminatory rules-based world trading system. Furthermore, over the past decade, almost from the time the Uruguay Round was concluded, the WTO has been trashed by all Member governments. The WTO has always prided itself on being a ‘member driven’ organisation, and this partly explained its past success. But in recent years Members have driven the WTO in only one direction: into the ground.

The WTO despair is not an economic crisis but a political one. Governments have been poor custodians of the WTO, and have trashed it. Only Members can turn it around, but the political will to do so is seriously lacking. It is not that there is no direction in the WTO but that the major Members, including the US and EU, are providing bad leadership and most countries, including Australia, are choosing to adopt these bad habits. But is it too late to save the WTO, and does saving the WTO really matter?

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