• The Doha round

The Doha round

The WTO’s rush in July 2008 was an attempt to break the logjam on "modalities" for agriculture and NAMA in the marathon Doha Round negotiations. This paper is a counterfactual analysis of the various explanations that have been offered for the failure.

The paper firstly states that the failure in July does not suggest that a successful Doha Round outcome is impossible nor does it indicate the need for significant WTO reform. On the other hand, it points that a determinant answer of how close members were to agreement may be impossible, but one can assess the significance of the factors in an explanation. Accordingly, the paper suggests causal factors deemed to be worthy of further exploration.

The paper finds that most of these factors were not new to the WTO in July 2008, and even in combination were not enough to cause the breakdown of the negotiations. Indeed, the reason behind the failure was that negotiators had more work to do before ministers could close the deal. For example, the paper shows that a lack of consensual understanding of the Special Safeguard Mechanism (SSM) contributed seriously to the collapse.

Furthermore, the paper concludes that it is the leads that were the problem in this play, not the chorus, even if the leads sometimes played to the gallery. Equally important, the paper notes that if the Director-General had been allowed to keep the list of issues for ministerial decision small, the gamble might have worked.

The paper's recommendations to avoid more failures are:

• tough decisions must be well prepared for ministers with limited time and technical knowledge
• elements of a package have to be assembled bit by bit
• the role for ministers is just to bless the assemblage when the "single undertaking" is ripe

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