Suppose that the current deadlock on the Doha trade talks has been broken as developed countries agreed on the dramatic reduction of agricultural tariffs and subsidies. Would such ostensibly generous concessions be automatically translated into poor countries’ enhanced market access to rich countries’ markets? I question this premise by observing that “administrative barriers” such as antidumping measures, regulatory standards (SPS/TBT), and rules of origin, may still impede the poor countries' market access, filling in the gap of conventional trade barriers, such as tariffs and subsidies. (Daniel Kono dubbed this entropic phenomenon as “optimal obfuscation.”)
You can download my paper here. It was presented at Berkeley Journal of International Law 2007 Stefan A. Riesenfeld Symposium, The WTO & International Trade Law After Doha: Where do we go from here?, on March 2.
