Policy: Closure of the Doha Rounds?

The Doha Development Round is potentially coming to a close with a new working paper “Conclude Doha, It Matters!” . Most of Doha deals with trade regulations and tariffs, but it touched a little on infrastructure too.

“According to the working paper, developing countries will benefit from a Doha deal as a result of reductions in high “peak” tariffs that constrain their exports. They also have much to gain from actions to reduce the costs of moving goods through borders and from taking advantage of the Aid for Trade initiative, which seeks to improve infrastructure, trade institutions and policies to help countries to exploit trade opportunities.” WB Press Release

The Aid for Trade initiative basically promotes policy and financial incentives for improving means for trade (which includes infrastructure). “Conclude Doha” is also a continuation of the World Bank’s series on the global economic crisis and looks to trade and the WTO in order to alleviate some of the pressure. It lobbies hard for multilateral trade agreements, calling regional trade organizations (think the EU) as “imperfect solutions”.

This working paper is pretty interesting and makes some good arguments for trade liberalization and multilateral relationships. The closure of the Doha Round will become more likely as the impacts of the global economic uncertainty come into play.