Consulta de resultados

in WTO: from Geneva to Doha/Cancún

As has been mentioned, developing countries’ demands on the multilateral system go beyond the specific features of special and differential treatment. In this regard, they have raised broader concerns over the conception and

asymmetry of the agreements and biases in compliance, which generated the programme of work agreed upon in Doha. The expectations that progress would be made in subsequent work remained unfulfilled, however.

15 See Silva (2001) for further background on this debate, especially from Seattle to Doha.

16 The structure of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) escapes this analysis in some degree, since it provides the flexibility to assume commitments on national treatment.

17 The costs and requirements involved in implementing agreements on such issues as TRIPs, Customs Valuation and sanitary and phytosanitary measures are examined in Finger and Schuler (1999).

18 More than 50% of the proposals at the Seattle Conference came from the developing countries. This was also the expiry date for many of the transition periods for these countries to make the legislative, regulatory and institutional changes needed to meet their obligations.

2.

Towards a full review of special and differential treatment

effectiveness of the provisions on special and differential treatment shows that the objectives have been only partially achieved. The constraints and failings are caused by a number of factors: (i) the weakness of the recommendations; (ii) inadequate technical assistance; (iii) limitations on the forms of implementation of agreements of interest to the developing countries, such as textiles and agriculture; and (iii) inadequacy of transition periods –the most commonly used available instrument– for the institutional changes developing countries must set in motion.19 _{Consequently, work in}

this field arising from the Doha Declaration was geared towards examining the provisions for special and differential treatment in order to strengthen those provisions and make them more precise, effective and operational, as set out in paragraph 44 of the Declaration (see section D) (WTO, 2001b).

In other words, the special and differential treatment provisions in the multilateral system are ineffective in helping the developing countries to benefit from integration into the international trading system. In recent years, proposals have been made to incorporate the development dimension into trade negotiations. These have included ranking or differentiation of developing countries, a sectoral or thematic focus and policy space. A ranking of developing countries was clearly established at the Uruguay Round with the distinction of LDCs which, as described in the preceding chapter, were permitted to act on a non-reciprocal basis.20 _In

WTO (as in GATT), developing countries are those that define themselves as such, whereas LDCs are identified by the United Nations as countries whose per capita income is less than US$ 1,000. The group of countries with per capita income of over US$ 1,000 (all the Latin American and Caribbean countries with the exception

of Haiti) have very dissimilar levels of development, however. For this reason, there have been proposals for a more sectoral or regional approach that recognizes the specificity of domestic conditions as well as the need to define eligibility using criteria that include non- economic variables. Some authors have suggested that the inter-sectoral heterogeneity within an economy should be used as a basis for examination, as opposed to a ranking based on global national criteria, since supply constraints, level of competitiveness and institutional capacity can be better evaluated at a sectoral level (Corrales-Leal, 2003; Tórtora, 2003).

The proposal on development policy space cites the need for a proactive effort to deal with problems and identifies policy instruments which are governed by multilateral rules, for example, subsidies or other incentives, import restrictions, preferences in government procurement and active mechanisms for strengthening the domestic market. On the supply side, special and differential treatment should give developing countries scope for stimulating the competitiveness of their businesses and locking into the benefits of liberalization. The Uruguay Round limited manoeuvering room for making discriminatory policies and thus the autonomy of governments to channel subsidies to specific businesses and sectors.

Lastly, other proposals have referred to the rules in their totality, citing the difficulty of isolating special and differential treatment from other development-related aspects within the multilateral system.21 _{In this regard,}

some kind of mechanism is needed to evaluate future agreements in terms of their contribution to development goals or their repercussions on implementation costs. The non-automaticity of the single undertaking implementation in developing countries also warrants review.

19 An evaluation of the shifts in direction of the special and differential treatment and their results are contained in UNCTAD (1999a); Whalley (1999); Laird (2000); Michalopoulos (2000); ECLAC (2001a and 2001b); WTO (2001a) and Tórtora (2003).

20 Strictly speaking, the different agreements contain other specific categories of countries such as: countries that are net importers of food (agriculture), small suppliers (textiles and apparel), transition economies, special category of countries (annex VII to the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures).

21 The recommendations submitted by a group of developing countries –including Cuba, Honduras and the Dominican Republic– at the Fourth Ministerial Conference may be viewed in this light (WTO, 2001e).

D. From the Doha Development Agenda to the absence