Customer Reviews

The WTO After Seattle

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The World Trade Organization's 1999 meeting in Seattle has already gone down in history as the Battle of Seattle. Instead of discussing international trade issues, the participants looked on in horror as gangs of protesters wrecked the center of Seattle. Instead of sipping coffee in Starbuck's, they watched as the rioters gutted every Starbuck's outlet they could find. For some reason that this weighty book does not fully explain, people who protest against the WTO seem to hate Starbuck's.

The Institute for International Economics, which published this book, is probably above such venalities. Its Board of Directors includes some of the world's most influential figures including Conrad Black, Miguel de la Madrid, Nigel Lawson, Lee Kwan Yew, Paul O'Neill, David Rockefeller, Paul Krugman, George Schulz and even Alan Greenspan himself. Taken as a group, they certainly know their way around the corridors of power.

That being so, it is a pity that they do not seem to be able to write well. The book is a rather turgid discussion of the issues that should have been aired at Seattle. Spokespeople for the United States, the European Union and the world's other major economic powers are each given a separate chapter to themselves. So too are such less than inspiring topics as intellectual property, anti-dumping legislation and electronic commerce. If nothing else, the book will suit economics professors looking for additional dull readings to inflict upon their unsuspecting students.

Only two chapters enliven this otherwise comatose book. Surprisingly enough perhaps, the first of these is by Hisamitsu Arai from Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI). He begins by telling us that the Japanese delegation, like most others, had gone to Seattle with the best of intentions. The Japanese delegation, he tells us, went to Seattle, ready to debate the whole matrix of issues that are intertwined around international trade. The Japanese wanted to discuss not only the specific issues that concerned their American hosts but also the whole institutional and legal framework that continues to hold back international trade. MITI were intent on showing the United States some of the contradictions evident in their stance on a variety of issues. Whereas, for example, the United States objects to Japan and other countries dumping their products at below cost into the American market, Arai and his colleagues had evidence of 64 cases where the United States had dumped its own products into other market, Japan's included. MITI, whatever their faults may be, certainly do their homework.

As well as bringing up America's ambivalent attitude to its own shortcomings, Arai's chapter also raises another issue. That issue is Canada. He speaks of the Quadrilateral Group of Japan, the United States, the European Union and Canada. What is Canada, a very minor economic power doing in that august group and several others such as G7? Why Canada? Why not India for example?

Jayashree Watal, another contributor to this volume, would like to know. His contribution rails against the injustices mighty countries like his own India suffer from the great powers of Japan, the European Union and the United States as well as minnow powers like Canada. He sees the solution in putting development issues more to the center of future WTO debates.

But therein lies the rub. It would be nice if India could have as many outlets of Starbuck's, the Body Shop, McDonald's and Kingburger as mighty countries like Japan and the United States have. However, before such a thing can come to pass, India's per capital income would have to approach the levels pertaining in the United States, Japan and Europe. Because that is not likely to happen in the foreseeable future, trade referees like the WTO, turgid commentators like the Institute for International Economics and unfortunate targets like Starbuck's will continue to flourish. There are some important lessons failures in economics can teach us. Indonesia's ethnic and sectarian strife is a case in point. The WTO, along with the World Bank and the IMF, have a case to answer there. It would be nice if those bodies and the rent-a-mob Starbuck's haters who follow their meetings around addressed themselves to finding fair and equitable solutions to the seemingly intractable problems that eventuate when economic and other forces cause countries like Indonesia to implode. Books like this one that concentrate too much on hitting the right diplomatic keys and on not alienating any of their key sponsors only prolong the problems of global inequity they purport to address.