The Trade Game: Negotiation Trends at WTO and Concerns of Developing Countries

Notwithstanding the WTO objective, even eleven years after the inception of the multilateral body, the trade barriers, both in developed and developing countries are quite significant and unilateral liberalization is not easily forthcoming. Although this lack of market access hurt the developing countries much more severely than their developed counterparts, the former groups never systematically bargained at the negotiating table with the latter before the Doha Ministerial (2001). Looking at the negotiating strategies of India and several other WTO members over the years, the nine papers in this volume explore the current negotiating scenario and the concerns for India and other developing countries. While some papers attempts to chalk out the future of global free trade and the determinants of protectionism of major players, the other ones look into the future of India’s sectoral negotiating strategy. The introduction notes that judging by the experience of Cancun (2003) and the recent Hong Kong Ministerial (2005), developing countries are last emerging as quick learners of the rules of the game, but need to sharpen those skills further: “It is quite prudent to understand that hidden from public glare, both the battle and the war will now continue in Geneva, which is less of a free trade bastion than Hong Kong. It is by now a time-honoured fact that the intensity of liberalization undertaken at home makes handling the WTO-induced reforms easier, and the priorities for Indian policy makers are therefore, obvious.”