We can lay the blame for Doha’s delay at lots of doorsteps. But fundamentally, we would hope that if the deal were rich enough, if it improved welfare enough, people would find a way to agree.
Economists know that dismantling barriers to trade makes the world better off: this is the fundamental theorem of welfare economics. But the WTO is a complex entity, and some of its rules dismantle barriers, while others allow barriers to remain in place. And the improvement that welfare economics points to is an aggregate improvement: no particular individual, and no particular state, can be assured of improvement. Some rules seem to reduce the welfare of the poorest. What economists don’t seem to know is whether any particular country would benefit from the Doha Round proposals currently on the table. But what if we had this information? What if negotiations in the future were based on the principle that every state should get an improvement in welfare, of about the same per capita size, and that the poorest states should get a bigger improvement than the wealthy ones? What if we appointed a committee of professional economists to supervise the work to ensure this outcome, and to rewrite the existing package of rules accordingly? This work could be performed openly, and could be subjected to the scrutiny of the community of professional economists.
If a package were developed this way, what state would decline to accept the outcome? What government could explain to its citizens its refusal to do so?
