A top World Trade Organization (WTO) official warned on Friday that a growing web of regional trading agreements threatens to wreck global trade negotiations.
"There are more voices saying we are not interested in multilateral arrangements and this can be extremely unhealthy and it is time we did something on this," said Stuart Harbinson, director in the office of WTO chief Supachai Panitchpakdi.
There are now 150 regional trading agreements in force, he told business leaders at a conference being held parallel to a weekend Asia-Pacific political summit in the Chilean capital Santiago.
Another 70 were in the works and by the end of 2007, the total could snowball to 300, he said.
The spread of such deals would distract attention from and dampen the force behind the main WTO trade talks, launched in Doha, Qatar in 2001, to open up farm, industrial and services sectors, Harbinson said.
"This expanding web of RTAs (regional trading arrangements) raises the question of the workability of parallel multilateral approaches," Harbinson said.
Unlike WTO trade rules, which are standard across the world, bilateral and other regional free trade agreements vary widely and are largely discriminatory against other partners. They also tended to jack up production costs because businesses have to comply with a variety of trading rules.
Prominent US economist Fred Bergsten warned that regional trading arrangements threatened to produce trading blocs centering around Europe, the Americas and Asia and eventually create a "dangerous" tripolar trading system and trade wars.
The US, for example, stands to lose exports totalling some US$25 billion a year if an East Asian Free Trade plan becomes a reality, he warned at the conference Friday.
Nevertheless, free trade agreements were a key insurance against any failure of of current multilateral trade talks, said Bergsten, director of the Washington-based Institute for International Economics.
"The prospects for the Doha round are uncertain," he said.
The round is aimed at a binding international treaty among 148 WTO nations, but disagreements over how to proceed in key areas such as agriculture have bogged down negotiations.
Leaders of the APEC forum who meet in Santiago at the weekend are expected to discuss a business leaders' proposal for the creation of a Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific embracing the giant trading groups of the Americas and East Asia.
MULTIFACETED: A task force has analyzed possible scenarios and created responses to assist domestic industries in dealing with US tariffs, the economics minister said The Executive Yuan is tomorrow to announce countermeasures to US President Donald Trump’s planned reciprocal tariffs, although the details of the plan would not be made public until Monday next week, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said yesterday. The Cabinet established an economic and trade task force in November last year to deal with US trade and tariff related issues, Kuo told reporters outside the legislature in Taipei. The task force has been analyzing and evaluating all kinds of scenarios to identify suitable responses and determine how best to assist domestic industries in managing the effects of Trump’s tariffs, he
TIGHT-LIPPED: UMC said it had no merger plans at the moment, after Nikkei Asia reported that the firm and GlobalFoundries were considering restarting merger talks United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電), the world’s No. 4 contract chipmaker, yesterday launched a new US$5 billion 12-inch chip factory in Singapore as part of its latest effort to diversify its manufacturing footprint amid growing geopolitical risks. The new factory, adjacent to UMC’s existing Singapore fab in the Pasir Res Wafer Fab Park, is scheduled to enter volume production next year, utilizing mature 22-nanometer and 28-nanometer process technologies, UMC said in a statement. The company plans to invest US$5 billion during the first phase of the new fab, which would have an installed capacity of 30,000 12-inch wafers per month, it said. The
Taiwan’s official purchasing managers’ index (PMI) last month rose 0.2 percentage points to 54.2, in a second consecutive month of expansion, thanks to front-loading demand intended to avoid potential US tariff hikes, the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. While short-term demand appeared robust, uncertainties rose due to US President Donald Trump’s unpredictable trade policy, CIER president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) told a news conference in Taipei. Taiwan’s economy this year would be characterized by high-level fluctuations and the volatility would be wilder than most expect, Lien said Demand for electronics, particularly semiconductors, continues to benefit from US technology giants’ effort
‘SWASTICAR’: Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s close association with Donald Trump has prompted opponents to brand him a ‘Nazi’ and resulted in a dramatic drop in sales Demonstrators descended on Tesla Inc dealerships across the US, and in Europe and Canada on Saturday to protest company chief Elon Musk, who has amassed extraordinary power as a top adviser to US President Donald Trump. Waving signs with messages such as “Musk is stealing our money” and “Reclaim our country,” the protests largely took place peacefully following fiery episodes of vandalism on Tesla vehicles, dealerships and other facilities in recent weeks that US officials have denounced as terrorism. Hundreds rallied on Saturday outside the Tesla dealership in Manhattan. Some blasted Musk, the world’s richest man, while others demanded the shuttering of his
RSS