Opportunities to Lower Trade Barriers

Lowering trade barriers would contribute to all four of the likely main goals of the United Nations’ post-2015 development agenda: poverty alleviation, ending hunger, reducing income inequalities, and strengthening global partnerships for sustainable development (United Nations, 2014).

Stronger global partnerships for sustainable development would result from promoting a more open, rules-based, nondiscriminatory and equitable multilateral trading system by successfully completing the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) negotiations at the World Trade Organization (WTO). Remaining barriers to trade harm most the economies imposing them, but the worst of the merchandise barriers (in agriculture and textiles) are particularly harmful to the world's poorest producers. Reforming those policies would thus alleviate poverty, reduce income inequality within and between nations, reduce malnutrition and hunger globally, and boost employment and economic growth sustainably, particularly in rural areas of developing countries, where three-quarters of the world's poor reside (World Bank, 2007).

It is within the power of national governments to lower their own barriers to trade unilaterally, of course, but often that is difficult to achieve politically. Lowering them is politically easier when other countries do so at the same time, as with a multilateral or regional trade and integration agreement. For developing countries that is especially so if that agreement includes an aid-fortrade package.

Among the possible strategies to reduce remaining price- and trade-distorting measures, five current opportunities stand out. The most beneficial involves multilaterally completing the stalled Doha Development Agenda (DDA) of the World Trade Organization (WTO). If that continues to prove to be too difficult politically to bring to a conclusion in the near future, three other opportunities considered here are the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), extending the free-trade area among the ten-member Association of South East Asian Nations to include China, Japan, and South Korea (ASEAN+3), and freeing up trade among all APEC countries (a free trade area of the Asia-Pacific, FTAAP). One more potential opportunity involves bringing disciplines to export restrictions to match those for import restrictions, especially for farm products.