Word: montreal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Clayton Yeutter was looking for a strong send-off. The veteran U.S. Trade Representative, whose tenure ends in January, had hoped that last week's trade talks in Montreal would produce significant progress, especially on knotty problems like agricultural subsidies and intellectual property rights. He did not get it. After four days of exhausting round-the-clock negotiations, the talks ended in deadlock on several major issues, forcing a four-month extension of discussions. Said a philosophical Yeutter: "This provides additional opportunities for creative thinking...
...meetings were called as a midterm review of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations, launched in the beach resort of Punta del Este two years ago. The purpose of the Montreal gathering, held under the auspices of the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade: to establish guidelines for furthering free trade. Instead, last week's GATT meetings, involving delegates from 103 nations, were dominated by an inconclusive and bitter row between the U.S. and the European Community. The chief issue was an American demand that all nations agree to the total elimination of subsidies to farmers, which...
...farm-policy debate overshadowed all other discussions in Montreal. Delegates were able, though, to adopt a framework for continued negotiations in the fast-growing services industries, including banking, investment and communications, which now account for some 30% of all international trade. Yet efforts to protect intellectual-property rights were stymied. The U.S. estimates that pirating and counterfeiting of such goods as tape cassettes and computer software cost American firms more than $40 billion a year...
After the lackluster Montreal performance, many countries may be tempted to bypass GATT and negotiate more bilateral or regional pacts with only a few trading partners. Still, no one is quite ready to abandon GATT. Says Bill Martin, chief economist of Phillips & Drew, a leading London brokerage firm: "There's not great hope that GATT can achieve much in the way of further trade liberalization. But GATT is a very important bulwark against galloping protectionism." An important bulwark, but an increasingly leaky...
...native of Kent, in the southeast of England, Brand has shown a similar fascination with new topics throughout his career. As a teenager he wandered through much of Europe, ultimately setting out for the New World, where he worked as a reporter in Montreal. Later he earned a B.A. from New York University. For 16 years, Brand worked at the Wall Street Journal, where as a science reporter he won an American Association for the Advancement of Science-Westinghouse Science Journalism Award for stories on protein research and artificial intelligence. After a few years of helping edit the paper...