Peter Gallagher on Asian Attitudes

Peter Gallagher on Asian Attitudes on Trade Issues

Our man in Manila reports on a conference on multilateral trade and the WTO Doha Round of trade negotiations: "Asian business views on WTO":

"I spent a couple of days in the last week at a conference organized by the UN International Trade Centre in Manila (Philippines) in which 45 business leaders (CEOs of export companies, industry association executives) and government officials from 16 Asian and Middle East countries discussed the state of the multilateral trading system and the Doha round of trade negotiations.

The conference ranged over almost the whole agenda of negotiations in WTO. The participants, because of their backgrounds, were well-informed and likely to influence national approaches to the negotiations. So their opinions provide a good barometer of Asian region opinion about the WTO system..."

Lots of good stuff on Asian (except for China) opinions on the agricultural negotiations, the negotiations on trade in industrial products, the upcoming lifting of developed country textile barriers, and more. Here are Asian businessmen on the vogue for bilateral, as opposed to multilateral trade agreements:

"Many business leaders are worried that the rapid growth of discriminatory bilateral and regional trade agreements in Asia�a phenomenon that has been accelerated by offers from China�is going to make it more difficult to do business. I was surprised to see how clearly they �got� the problems that discriminatory agreements pose for the global trading system. They sense, correctly, that these agreements have a lot of transaction costs associated with them in the form of additional rules of origin and complicance requirements."