By Michael Ewing-Chow
I. Introduction
A former professor of mine was fond of telling us, “Beware of men who ask
binary questions because such men already know the answers they want
to get”.
When Singapore first started negotiating our first free trade agree-ments (FTAs), there was fear and loathing from many quarters. Some felt
that we were undermining the multilateral process for trade liberalisation
represented by the WTO.1
Others were concerned that we were under-mining the regional economies by potentially allowing Trojans into the
ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) by the backdoor.2
Both of these early criticisms were perhaps evidence of binary thinking
about trade liberalisation. Indeed, while most neo-classical economists
accept that there is a need to further the global trade liberalisation efforts,
how this should be done is less clear.
The indefinite suspension of the Doha round of world trade talks creates
big risks for the world economy. A new explosion of discriminatory bilat-eral and regional agreements is likely to substitute for global
liberalisation. This will inevitably erode the multilateral rules-based system
of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The backlash against globalisa-tion will generate more protectionism in the vacuum left as momentum
toward wide-ranging reduction of barriers ceases, especially as the world
economy slows and global trade imbalances continue to rise. Financial
markets will become more unstable as international economic coopera-tion breaks down further.
Bergsten called upon APEC to launch a Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific
(FTAAP) initiative to provide:
a “plan B” to get world trade policy back on track — to spur the revival of
Doha, to offer an ambitious alternative to restart the process of liberali-sation on the widest possible basis if that primary goal fails, and to
counter the proliferation of preferential deals among small groups of
countries.
However, again, this statement perhaps evidences a binary approach to
trade liberalisation with the underlying assumption that it should be mul-tilateral in preference to regional or bilateral.
Unlike many trade law academics who cut their teeth in GATT or WTO
negotiations, my first introduction to trade negotiations occurred when I
was appointed as a consultant for Singapore’s early FTA negotiations right
after we had concluded our first one — the Agreement between New
Zealand and Singapore on a Closer Economic Partnership (ANZSCEP). In
particular, I became involved in the Mexico-Singapore FTA which unfortu-nately faced significant political hurdles when then Mexican President
Vicente Fox and his Alliance for Change took over from the more trade lib-eral government of President Ernesto Zedillo in December 2000.
258 Michael Ewing-Chow
Now, Singapore was not the only country to embark on FTA negotia-tions at that time. At the end of the 20th century, there was a surge in
bilateral FTAs following the failure of the Third WTO Ministerial
Conference held in Seattle in 1999 where an uneasy coalition of environ-mental and labour rights activists as well as protectionist lobby groups
caused a collapse in trade negotiations. During this time, Singapore also
embarked on a series of bilateral FTAs.
The official position was that
Singapore saw FTAs as possible complements to the multilateral trade lib-eralisation process offered by the WTO.
While I had no attachment to the WTO or the GATT, like many other
trade academics, I had some reservations as to the wisdom of the FTA ini-tiative, believing that Seattle was only a blip on the road to trade
liberalisation. I saw the value of having alternatives but I was somewhat con-cerned that we were acting prematurely and thus diverting our attention
from the main game of WTO negotiations. This changed after Cancun.
II. A Change of Views
The WTO Fifth Ministerial Conference in Cancun, held in September
2003, was tasked in the 2001 Doha Ministerial Declaration “to take stock of
progress in the negotiations, to provide any necessary political guidance,
and take decisions as necessary”. Sadly, the collapse of the talks on 14th
September meant that these three ends could not be satisfactorily
achieved.
Although it would appear from the WTO’s summary of the Conference
proceedings that the lack of agreement on modalities for the “Singapore
issues”
precipitated the collapse of the talks,
the chief reason behind the
collapse in Cancun was ultimately due to the lack of progress on reducing
0 comments:
Post a Comment