Race For WTO Director-General Job: Seven Candidates Speak
CUTS-TradeForum
From: CUTS International
What Does the WTO Need From its Next DG?
WTO is going through a leadership transition as Pascal Lamy, Director-General (DG), is completing his second four-year term on September 1, 2013. Who replaces him matters. First, because the WTO is not generating the trade liberalization and policy reforms that will stimulate investment and job creation—a key issue given the grim economic situation today. Second, to safeguard past achievements: the rules-based multilateral regime was created to help prevent a recurrence of nationalistic trade policies and conflict. It provides a platform for communication and for nations to sit down together to agree on rules of the game and resolve disputes in a peaceful manner. It is critical there be a strong voice that reminds all stakeholders why the system was created.
Join the discussion on the GGP Network with key actors like Robert Zoellick, former World Bank President.
To read, please visit:
http://network.globalgovernanceprogramme.eu/what-does-the-wto-need-from-its-next-dg/
From: CUTS International
Race For WTO Director-General Job: Seven Candidates Speak
Edited by Bernard M. Hoekman, European University Institute, CEPR & ERF and Petros C. Mavroidis, European University Institute
The WTO Membership is going through a leadership transition. After eight years at the helm the incumbent Director-General, Pascal Lamy, steps down on 1 September 2013. Nine individuals from different parts of the globe, all with extensive experience in the area of trade policy, have been nominated by their governments to replace him. The set of candidates includes three women, four current Ministers in the sitting governments of their countries, and three others with Ministerial experience.
In a new VoxEU eBook seven of the candidates lay out their views on the challenges confronting the WTO and how to address them. Taken together, they provide a uniquely comprehensive view of the world’s trade governance problems. It will be an important reference long after the selection process ends.
To read, please visit: http://www.voxeu.org/article/pay-attention-wto-leadership-contest-it-matters
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CUTS-TradeForum
Questions for the world’s next trade chief
By Robert Zoellick, Financial Times, April 1, 2013
If it does not act, the WTO is at risk of being pushed aside.
Starting this month, the 159 economies of the World Trade Organisation will begin the selection of a new director-general. Instead of the usual practice of a selection based on personality and nationality, the nine candidates for WTO chief need to answer questions of policy leadership.
Pascal Lamy, the current director-general, made every effort to complete the Doha round of global trade negotiations. But that deal, launched in 2001, has foundered on differences between developed economies and major emerging markets. As a result, the WTO is at risk of being pushed aside.
The action is shifting to other venues, with the announcement of a US-EU trade negotiation being just the most recent. The next DG needs to have a policy agenda to modernise trade multilateralism to meet new challenges. I urge that each candidate should be assessed by the substance of their answers to five questions, which are drawn from the work of Gary Hufbauer and Jeffrey Schott of the Peterson Institute.
First, will you push for a “small package”, drawn from the Doha negotiations, of special benefit to poorer countries? The years of work have identified potential deals, starting with removing quotas and tariffs on almost all the exports of the least developed countries, which account for less than 1 per cent of world trade.
Given the changing outlook for world agriculture – a shift from chronic surpluses to increased demand – the WTO could end agricultural export subsidies and exempt humanitarian aid from food export controls, as the Group of 20 recommends. The WTO has also identified steps to facilitate trade through streamlined documentation and customs procedures. And the package could include reforms to the WTO dispute settlement process that would boost transparency and encourage speedy decisions with more settlements. Such a package would benefit the most vulnerable economies, while demonstrating that the WTO can still do business.
Second, will you encourage the completion of an international services agreement that offers reciprocal liberalisation to all economies willing to join? Some topics – such as the rapidly increasing services trade – have been held back because all WTO members are not yet willing to commit to openings. But when the WTO stalls, the dealmaking moves elsewhere. The global trading system should encourage “liberalisation by the willing” with others joining when ready. The services trade is increasingly important to boosting productivity in developing countries seeking to avoid the “middle-income trap” and to lowering costs of critical infrastructure development.
Third, will you support zero-for-zero “plurilateral” accords that bind all signatories to eliminating tariffs and other barriers reciprocally, sector-by-sector? For example, the information technology agreement of 1996 led to a boom in global sourcing and supply chains for IT products, by getting rid of barriers to trade in this sector. But its list of goods needs to be updated for the digital age, and the ITA II should include services. If the WTO does not create opportunities to conclude new liberalising deals within its framework, the action – and the creation of new rules for new issues – will move elsewhere.
Fourth, are you willing to press for principles to require fair dealing by state-owned enterprises? The increased importance of SOEs in the world economy – in financial services, telecommunications, steel, chemicals and energy, and other natural resources – requires new rules so that private businesses can compete fairly with state capitalism. The rules need not push privatisation or rollbacks of state enterprises, but they should require transparency, commercial behaviour, declarations of subsidies, non-discrimination and open procurement. As sovereign wealth funds discovered after they signed the Santiago principles in 2008, agreed, transparent rules build acceptance in the international system. Without such rules, many state enterprises, which seek to trade and invest abroad, will find themselves subject to new barriers.
Finally, will you agree to launch a discussion with the International Monetary Fund about the application of the existing WTO and IMF rules requiring that exchange rates shall not be manipulated to gain unfair trade advantage? Given the extraordinary monetary policies spawned by the financial crisis – and the risks of competitive devaluations of currencies – multilateral bodies should not abdicate responsibility on these questions. If multilateralism fails, unilateralism may prevail. Brazil has already urged the WTO to discuss these questions.
The WTO members need to face up to the key trade policy questions of the day, even if they do not yet agree on the answers. If the WTO members do not select a new leader with an agenda, global trade diplomacy will drift and other negotiations will fill the vacuum. A substantive selection process can give the WTO chief a mandate to get things done. That is what good global governance should be about.
Shuaihua Cheng
By Ricardo Meléndez-Ortiz, ICTSD Chief Executive, Geneva, 8 April 2013
From a sustainable development stance, ICTSD has for years advocated the critical role of the WTO in the management of the rapidly growing - and increasingly interdependent - world economy. The relevance today of the market access agreements, regulatory frameworks, and the dispute management mechanisms embodied in the World Trade Organization cannot be questioned. On a yearly basis, trillions of dollars of goods, services, and technologies cross borders through transactions enabled by the adherence to and observance of WTO law by most countries in the world.
This critical infrastructure acts as a backdrop and accommodates countries at all levels of development, making these transactions possible. In a world economy made up of countries with heterogeneous endowments and capabilities, trade exchanges maintain our ways and our routines. In the quest for a fairer and more sustainable world, there is little question of the imperative of frameworks and governance that facilitate our integration into a global community, as well as our transition to more environmentally sound practices and to less unequal societies.
For these same reasons, nobody could ignore the stress imposed on the WTO today by swift shifts in the politics and political economy of trade caused by a number of factors, including, not least, dramatic adjustments in public finances and deteriorating economics in most traditional OECD countries; relocation of vital and robust growth, to still roaring emerging economies - even if this has been unequal in many instances, and has sometimes come at the cost of increased price volatility in food, energy, and other commodities, particularly minerals; sharp alterations in weather; climate change impacts on comparative advantages; water distress; and increasing loss of biodiversity. In the past few years the world has been spinning through its seasons, as if confirming the “zero theses” of the age of anxiety: that we have fallen - simultaneously - into a zero-sum world (Gideon Rachman) and unto a G-zero world (Ian Bremmen). A situation of competition that would be predatory and diminishing of each other’s welfare rather than engendering, persistently spawning mutual opportunities and wealth; and a world that operates in a deficit of global leadership brought about by a shift in power relations and the inability of any country or group of countries to provide leverage and drive to an international cooperative agenda.
Though built on principles and norms that date back to the post-World War II years, the WTO is a relatively recent institution. The biggest difference between then and now can be encapsulated in two obvious facts: firstly, the undeniable deeper interdependence and integration of national economies into global markets. And, of great consequence for its future, the lessons learned since then.
For the multilateral trade system this means governing not for trans-Atlantic or trans-Pacific interests, but to a globalised economy and global welfare. It also means moving away from dogmatism on free trade, and away from one-size-fits-all approaches to trade and development policy towards more nimble responses to market failures and institutional shortcomings. This 21st Century WTO is expected to deliver predictability and economic stability, along with markets that support broad public policy societal ambitions.
In the years since the WTO was founded, the lessons learned in this regard have been many. The organisation has been tirelessly attempting to forge its place in this new and challenging world, as proven by the years of negotiations on the Doha Round agenda. But while countries have been engaged in this enormous exercise of better understanding the role of trade policy and of their possibilities for cooperation, supplementary regional, plurilateral and bilateral initiatives have been increasingly taking place. More importantly, during these years critical changes have taken place in the way in which production is organised across jurisdictions. The ensuing complexity has become overwhelming, particularly for the less capable and the weakest. We risk aggravating asymmetries in information and capacities, excluding some countries or regions from value-creation, and causing harm and diminishing welfare opportunities.
As the WTO prepares for its upcoming leadership transition, we are taking this opportunity to move away from the immediate considerations of what to do about the Doha negotiations, and asking Director-General candidates to instead look further ahead at the longer-range role of the organisation in the global quest for sustainability. Contributors were asked to respond to seven questions, on topics such as plurilateral agreements; preferential trade agreements; industrial policy; food security; climate change and energy; natural resources; and the role of trade in promoting structural transformation.
To date we’ve received texts from Ministers Taeho Bark; Anabel González; Tim Groser; Mari Pangestu; and Chief Alan Kyeremeten expressing a range of viewpoints with valuable depth and nuance, not available in other published analyses. Taking advantage of today’s technologies, we intend to maintain this publication as a living document, inviting further contributions and analysis. We aim to offer by year’s end a full-fledged book, as a lasting input into the debate on the future of the multilateral trade system.
Readers are invited to download the contents of this booklet in PDF form in its entirety, or to click through to the ICTSD website (www.ictsd.org), where they can read individual submissions or read responses on a question-by-question basis.
Regardless of who remains in the race for the Director-General position at the end of this week - and further down the road when the process ends in May - these responses help to frame the big questions that stakeholders and WTO members themselves will be facing in the coming years. It will give readers new insight into the challenges the global trade system faces, and it will inform them of the different approaches favoured by highly competent and authoritative individuals.
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