A ROAD AHEAD FROM CANCUN? WEIGHING UP SOME GIVE-AND-TAKE SCENARIOS IN A DDA SPIRIT

Given that around 20 percent of the members of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) are identified as least developed countries (LDC's), global trade negotiations, resumed after the Cancun fiasco of September 2003, must address some major development issues in the spirit of the Doha Development Agenda (DDA), if they are to make any headway. This will, predictably, involve some sensible give-and-take not only between the developed countries and the LDC's, but also amongst the LDC's themselves, and between them and other developing countries. Issues of restrictions affecting agricultural trade - a major factor in the failure at Cancun - need re-addressing; but non-agricultural trade issues must also feature in the negotiations as that could make some acceptable policy compromises possible. This paper investigates, in a computable-general-equilibrium (CGE) framework, the welfare impacts on selected developed and developing country groupings of several scenarios of trade liberalisation that are likely to enhance agricultural and non-agricultural trade flows within the LDC's, and between them and other developing countries. The scenarios will involve experimentation with selected commodities that are of special export interest to LDC's to identify some modalities of trade liberalisation and policy reciprocity, that are more likely to be acceptable to all parties.