Copyright © The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press.
Five hypotheses concerning the fate of the Singapore issues in the Doha Round
* University of St Gallen and CEPR, e-mail: simon.evenett{at}unisg.ch
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At the Cancún Ministerial Conference, the members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) disagreed on whether to launch negotiations on multilateral disciplines concerning the four areas of government policy collectively known as the ‘Singapore issues’. This amounted to a decision not to expand the WTO's boundaries along these dimensions. In this paper, five hypotheses concerning the treatment of the Singapore issues by the WTO's membership are described and assessed. The implications of this assessment for the likelihood that, at some future date, similar proposals can be successfully advanced in the multilateral trade arena are also discussed.
Key Words: WTO • Doha Round • Singapore issues
My writings can be downloaded from www.evenett.com, where there is further contact information. I thank a number of current and former trade officials for discussing the fate of the Singapore issues with me. Comments and suggestions from Bernard Hoekman and David Vines were gratefully received. I alone bear responsibility for the contents of this paper and for any errors and omissions.
1 For different accounts of what happened at the Cancún Ministerial Conference, see Ahmed (2003), Hoekman (2003), Khor (2003), and White & Case (2003).
2 An informative account of the treatment of the Singapore issues by the WTO membership through 2003 can be found in Federal Trust (2003)
3 For some time, several developing countries argued that it would be inappropriate to launch the Doha Round before the implementation matters arising from the Uruguay Round were resolved.
4 During the period 1995–9, certain industrialized countries argued for multilateral disciplines on labour standards and on environmental policy to be negotiated. Developing countries were able successfully to resist negotiations of the former, and negotiations on the latter were confined to a modest range of matters. In some literature, especially that written before 1999 or dealing with the period up to 1999, the term ‘Singapore issues’ is used to refer to the four government policy areas identified here in the main text plus the labour and environmental standards. After the Seattle Ministerial Conference, the term Singapore issues was rarely used in official circles to refer to anything other than the four areas of government policy identified in the main text.
5 The European Union (EU) is known for legal reasons as the European Communities in WTO matters. The 27 member states of the EU are WTO members in their own right. The European Commission speaks for all EU member states at almost all WTO meetings.
6 In particular Professor James Mathis.
7 See, for example, the Declaration of Second LDC Trade Ministers, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 31 May–2 June 2003 (which 49 least-developed countries (LDCs) signed), the African Trade Ministers Meeting, Grand Baie, Mauritius, 19–20 June 2003 (which 53 nations attended), and a subsequent submission to the WTO by 12 developing countries on 4 July 2003.
8 In this regard it is noteworthy that Ismail (2005) argued that insufficient progress towards a balanced outcome had been made before the Cancún Ministerial Conference. Ambassador Ismail represents South Africa at the WTO, a post he has held for much of the Doha Round.
9 The comments of one senior Bangladeshi trade diplomat on this matter can be found in Ahmed (2003).
10 The Green Room is WTO-speak for the place where negotiations occur between a subset of WTO members typically invited by the WTO Director General. Formally, agreements made in the Green Room are not sufficient to become WTO agreements. The entire WTO membership must agree before the latter can occur.
11 Interestingly, observers as diverse as Pascal Lamy, then Commissioner of Trade for the EC, and Martin Khor (of the Third World Network) blamed the collapse of the Cancún Ministerial Conference on the WTO's decision-making procedures and not on the Singapore issues (see Lamy, 2003; Khor, 2003). It may be revealing that in hindsight it has been very difficult to find articles about this Ministerial Conference that argue that the Singapore issues were the sole cause, or even the most important cause, of the collapse. Sandrey (2006) is an exception.
12 It does not follow that supporting a case for the inclusion of each Singapore issue in the Single Understanding must imply supporting the case for bundling all four issues together into a single decision concerning inclusion.
13 Quite a distinct criticism concerns whether the EC sufficiently demonstrated some of the linkages across some of the Singapore issues or exploited those linkages in making its case to the WTO membership. For example, so many contemporary foreign direct investments are in fact cross-border mergers and acquisitions. A coherent package of measures concerning the overseas expansion of firms would need to take into account considerations of investment policy (pre- and post-establishment) and competition law and its enforcement (in particular, the law on mergers and acquisitions).
14 An implication of the missed deadlines before the Cancún Ministerial Conference is that, in effect, all of the bargaining would have to take place at the Ministerial Conference. On this expectation the EC may have been loath to make a proposal for differentiated treatment of the Singapore issues before this Ministerial Conference began, because of fears that the associated concession would have been ‘pocketed’, that is, not reciprocated by other WTO members. This observation indicates some of the difficulties in devising negotiating strategies when a series of sequential negotiations on various components of a package are inconclusive and the associated deadlines are missed, which in turn hardens the positions of some or all of the negotiating parties. Under these circumstances, the subsequent Ministerial Conference is not where the loose ends of the negotiations are tied up (as might have been envisaged), but the venue where the negotiations on all related matters effectively begin in earnest. This last observation raises systemic questions about how best to organize a negotiation on a package with many different elements, as well as questions about what the optimal negotiating strategy is for a major player in those negotiations.
15 The EC was clear, however, in stating that it would offer technical assistance to developing countries, should additional multilateral disciplines be negotiated.
16 In my view this widespread change in view is worthy of its own objective intellectual history. It would be useful to learn what evidence persuaded trade analysts to change their view and then evaluate the soundness of that evidence and the policy implications drawn from that evidence.
17 I should add that before and since the Cancún Ministerial Conference there were few assessments of the proponents' proposals that made specific reference to the actual proposals advanced for multilateral disciplines, which is unsatisfactory, if not outright bizarre.
18 With the exception of Japan, most of the countries considered did not adopt competition laws until well into, or after, their fast growth phases, so the finding that they did not apply their competition laws in a discriminatory manner is not terribly surprising. Even so, it does serve as reminder that this form of discrimination could not have been part of the policy mix that contributed to the fast growth phase.
19 If one really wanted to be difficult here, one could argue that this empirical comparison is not enough. To demonstrate convincingly that under no plausible circumstances are the Singapore issues a priority for developing countries, one would have to show that none of the set of potential multilateral disciplines delivers gains to developing countries that are of the same order of magnitude as the expected benefits from trade reform in agricultural products, industrial products, or services. Indeed, given that the negotiating agenda at the WTO is not confined to the last three matters, one might compare the potential benefits from a Singapore issue favourably with the benefits likely to follow from any new multilateral rules on antidumping, especially if it is correct to expect very little in terms of new rules to restrict this form of contingent protection.
20 Readers may recall that the World Bank cut its estimates of the net benefits of completing the Doha Round negotiation by 80 per cent over the 4-year period 2001–5.
21 My own rather feeble effort in this regard can be found in Evenett (2003b).
22 I will not dwell on the fact that the proponents of a multilateral framework on competition explicitly ruled out the creation of such an agency and confined their actual proposals to disciplines on national competition law or, where WTO members chose to cooperate in this fashion, regional competition law.
23 The proposal by the EC that each WTO member enact and enforce a national cartel law could meet a requirement of promoting development because one of the forms of cartel is bid-rigging, where firms collude in the bids that they make for state contracts. Developing-country governments are the targets of bid-rigging as submissions and presentations at the OECD's Global Fora on Competition have shown. School construction projects in China, for example, have cost more than they should because of bid-rigging.
24 Further thoughts in this regard can be found in Evenett (2007), together with some statistics and quotations from leading policy-makers from some of the rising trading powers that suggest that officials are beginning to see that certain Singapore issues merit greater attention in their national trade policies.
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