TY  - JOUR
AU  - Bagwell, Kyle
AU  - Staiger, Robert W
TI  - Can the Doha Round be a Development Round? Setting a Place at the Table
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 17650
PY  - 2011
Y2  - December 2011
DO  - 10.3386/w17650
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17650
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17650.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Kyle Bagwell
Department of Economics
Stanford University
Landau Economics Building
579 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA 94305-6072
Tel: (650) 723-3251
E-Mail: kbagwell@stanford.edu

Robert W. Staiger
Department of Economics
Dartmouth College
319 Silsby
Hanover, NH 03755
Tel: (603)-646-9345
E-Mail: rstaiger@dartmouth.edu
M1  - published as Kyle Bagwell, Robert W. Staiger. "Can the Doha Round Be a Development Round? Setting a Place at the Table," in Robert C. Feenstra and Alan M. Taylor, editors, "Globalization in an Age of Crisis: Multilateral Economic Cooperation in the Twenty-First Century" University of Chicago Press (2014)

M3  - presented at "Globalization in an Age of Crisis", September 14-16, 2011
AB  - A fundamental objective of the Doha Round of WTO negotiations is to improve the trading prospects of developing countries. The 2001 declaration from the WTO Ministerial Conference in Doha, Qatar, commits the member governments to negotiations aimed at substantial improvements in market access with a view to phasing out export subsidies, while embracing "special and differential treatment" for developing countries as an integral part of all elements of the negotiations. The main message of this paper comes in three parts. First, these stated aims are incompatible from the perspective of our economic analysis; thus, if these aims are pursued as stated, then we conclude that they are unlikely to deliver the meaningful trade gains for developing countries that the WTO membership seeks. Second, in attempting to integrate its developing country membership into the world trading system, the WTO may face a "latecomers" problem that, while occurring also in earlier rounds, is unprecedented in its scale in the Doha Round, and which could potentially account for the current impasse. And third, we argue that if the Round maintains its stated aims but moves away from the non-reciprocal special-and-differential treatment norm as the cornerstone of the approach to meeting developing country needs in the WTO, and if developing countries prepare, in markets where they are large, to come to the bargaining table and to negotiate reciprocally with each other and with developing nations, then it might be possible to break the impasse at Doha, to address the latecomers problem, and to deliver trade gains for developing countries.
ER  -