Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Globalization Progress: "Pot Meet Kettle" and the Power of Institutions

Well, the Doha Round of trade negotiations has collapsed amid a flurry of finger pointing, according to this story from The Wall Street Journal. I go back to the old saw, "When something goes wrong, point your finger - and remember three more point back at you." It seems that this holds true this round. The rising economies basically expected to be able to insist on the same exceptions as the Western economies have put in place for decades - at least when it came to agricultural protection. Can you believe it? They wanted to be treated equally when it came to negotiating an equal playing field?

However, this does not necessarily mean globalization is grinding to a halt. There is a great deal that can be done institutionally within individual countries (including ours). Read the case in this opinion piece, also from WSJ.

If you run across more pieces on the collapse of the Doha round during the next few days, please share them if you think they are clear and well-written. And include some ideas for using them in a classroom environment.

6 comments:

Rdan said...

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/dead-doha/

http://angrybear.blogspot.com/2008/07/final-collapse-of-wto-doha-talks.html

Tim Schilling said...

Do you have any classroom suggestions to go with these?

I saw Krugman's piece. Although I didn't think he provided enought in the way of analysis as to the why the talks failed.

I also read the CEPR release. I liked Dani Rodrik's piece for the Carnegie Endowment better. It's here
http://www.policyinnovations.org/ideas/commentary/data/000072

Rdan said...

The link goes to a list...can you clarify? Rodrik is usually very good.

Classroom ideas to arrive tomorrow...my day job gets in the way sometimes.

Tim Schilling said...

I don't know why you're getting a list. Try this:
http://www.policyinnovations.org/ideas/
commentary/data/000072

Rdan said...

Thanks Tim. The rest of the url had been truncated by the leave a comment section. Rodrik's piece is the best of the bunch for us.

He uses the term open trade...what does that mean?

Unknown said...

This seems to be the classic common good problem...I have been thinking that most behavior involves transferring the cost onto someone else...This makes placing the blame very easy.