Yves Leduc, DFC’s Director of International Trade attended a session on Thursday called “Governments, non state actors and trade policy-making: negotiating preferentially or multilaterally,” which looked at the various players behind how trade agreements are negotiated at both the domestic and international levels.
Mr. Leduc reported that a number of case studies were presented and, in part, looked at the involvement of non-state actors in developing countries in trade negotiations. In response to a question as to whether developing countries prefer negotiating at the bilateral or multilateral level, the panelists concluded that while preferential negotiations are often viewed as complementary to the multilateral negotiation at the WTO, most developing countries seem to actually favor multilateral negotiations as they perceive those as affecting the fewest impacts on their economy and expect that they will not have to give up as much as they normally would with a preferential agreement.
To illustrate this point, one panelist gave the example of president from developing countries coming back from a foreign mission and directing their officials and bureaucrats to negotiate a preferential trade agreement to foster the relationship with their new “friends”. Many countries that have negotiated such agreements in an effort to strengthen friendships between two nations are now facing trade deficits with that trading partner.
The session closed with an interesting statement that “preferential agreements are 90% strategic and 10% economic.” This was explained by discussing the case of trade in Jordan, a small economic player in the Mid-East, who has concluded a multitude of free trade agreements with important trading countries, due largely to its strategic geographic position.
No comments:
Post a Comment