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Contents
> Director-General’s letter to journalists
> The Doha Development Agenda
> Agriculture
> Cotton
> Services
> Market access, non-agricultural products
> Intellectual property (TRIPS)
> Trade facilitation
> Rules: ad, scm including fisheries subsidies
> Rules: regional agreements
> Dispute settlement
> Trade and environment
> Small economies
> Trade, debt and finance
> Trade and technology transfer
> Technical cooperation
> Least-developed countries
> Special and differential treatment
> Implementation issues
> Electronic commerce
> Members and accessions
> Members
> Bananas
> Statistics, Textiles and Clothing
> Statistics, Facts and Figures
> Jargon buster, Country groupings
> Jargon buster, An informal guide to ‘WTOspeak’
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Defining scope and identifying
problems back to top
The Doha Declaration mandates, in its paragraph
35, the General Council to examine the problems faced by small
and vulnerable economies and to make recommendations to improve
the integration
of such economies into the multilateral trading system. This is
to be done, however, without creating a new or separate sub-category
of WTO members. Discussions on the mandate have taken place since
2002 in the Committee on Trade and Development (CTD) meeting in
dedicated
session.
Work to date … back to top
The proponents of small economies, represented
mainly by a group of landlocked countries and island nations, have started
to identify various characteristics and problems specific to small and
vulnerable economies. These include physical isolation and geographical
distance to main markets, lack of adequate market access opportunities
for their exports, a high degree of vulnerability and, in some cases,
low levels of production, insufficient supply and low competitiveness.
In an effort to move forward with the Work Programme, the proponents
have started to present suggestions to other members as a first step
towards drafting recommendations for actions which could be taken to
assist small and vulnerable economies with their integration into the
multilateral trading system.
On a parallel track, the proponents of small
economies have recently started to present some of their concerns and
positions to the DDA negotiating groups such as agriculture and NAMA.
Some WTO members, however, and especially some developing countries
which claim they are facing many of the same problems as those of the
proponents,
remain sceptical and have said they have difficulty forming trade-related
responses to the concerns raised by the proponents. They view many
of the issues identified by the small economies as either falling outside
the scope of the WTO's work or as already being addressed in other
negotiating
groups. While some members believe that it is too early in the negotiations
to address the issues of concern of small economies and that more work
is required on finding trade-related solutions, others see a complementarity
and view the parallel approach being taken in the dedicated session
and in the negotiating groups as a way of moving forward and of addressing
the specific issues of concern to small and vulnerable economies. |
Other material:
> Work Programme on Small Economies
> Doha
declaration
> Doha declaration
explained
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