In Foreign Affairs, Aaditya Mattoo and Arvind Subramanian argue:
But the issues now at stake in Doha are marginal, and, more important, Doha distracts attention from other matters of greater significance, such as the consequences for trade from misaligned exchange rates and environmental protection.
One of the points -- although in fairness, it's not their main argument -- they make in support is:
Tariffs on goods have declined from a worldwide average of over 25 percent in 1980 to less than ten percent today. Many states have drastically reduced barriers to foreign investment and international trade in various service sectors, including finance, telecommunications, transport, and retail. Much of this liberalization has taken place in the context of regional trade agreements, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and a series of agreements between the European Union and its eastern neighbors. Since the early 1990s, the number of such pacts has risen from under 90 to nearly 400.
These parallel unilateral and regional efforts at liberalization ended up robbing the multilateral process of some of its raison d'être.
I've heard something along these lines suggested before. Tariffs are already pretty low, so international cooperation should focus on other issues. I agree that there are other important issues that require mulitlateral efforts. However, when I look at current tariff levels, I still see a lot of room for international efforts to reduce them. Here's the WTO's "World Tariff Profile 2008". You don't have to look very hard to find some extremely high applied duties, particularly for agricultural products. And this is just about regular tariffs, and does not take into account the additional barriers imposed by trade remedies (anti-dumping, countervailing duties and safeguards).
I should point out that the authors take the view that Doha would not have helped much in this regard:
By the time the Doha talks resumed in Geneva last summer, little of consequence was even on the table. In richer developing countries -- a group that includes Brazil, China, and India -- the reforms proposed would have left average tariff rates for agricultural goods unchanged, at about 13.5 percent, and would have reduced tariff rates for manufactured goods only slightly, from 6.4 percent to 5.6 percent.
While this might be true, I think it is important to emphasize that there are significant, traditional trade barriers that still exist, and that WTO negotiations could take them on (even if the current negotiations do not), with the benefits of success very high.
That's not to say the other issues they mention should be ignored, and perhaps some of them should take precedence over trade matters. However, I think it's possible to tackle trade barriers without detracting from these other efforts (and to some extent they can be mutually reinforcing, for example, by reducing tariffs on environmentally friendly goods).
