Completing the Doha Round

POLICY BRIEF 06-7

Completing the Doha Round

by Jeffrey J. Schott, Peterson Institute for International Economics

October 2006

Reviving and completing the Doha Round will pose significant challenges for all the major trading nations. The United States has to make further cuts in farm support and open up trade in labor services, and the European Union has to do more on agricultural market access as well as industrial tariffs and services. Major developing countries need to make concrete offers to reduce protection for goods and services and to give poorer developing countries preferential market access. China needs to contribute more than any other developing country and perhaps as much as industrial countries on market access for manufactured goods. To complete the Doha Round, US officials need Congress to extend trade promotion authority (TPA), but it won’t do so unless the Bush administration demonstrates progress in trade talks. TPA is dead unless the Doha Round and big bilateral trade talks promise to deliver a substantial package of reforms in agriculture, manufactures, and services that create trade and investment opportunities for US firms, workers, and farmers.

View full document [pdf]