Word: worlds
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There is a considerable amount of confusion and posturing in this debate, but there are also some deeper reasons for the confusion. The WTO is in fact a mix of high principles of importance to a stable world, combined with narrow interests masquerading as high principles, and leavened with a host of unsolved conundrums about the ways we should cooperate in a globalized society and economy...
...principles behind the WTO are that a global set of agreed principles on trade and related matters will facilitate economic growth and will protect the poor from the power of the rich. These basic points are unexceptionable, except to people who know nothing of history or economic development. Expanded world trade is indeed an engine of development, for rich and poor countries alike. And the rule of law surely beats the rule of the jungle, especially for the weaker countries. The collapse of trade in the Great Depression taught us that lesson in brutal terms...
...keep out manufactured goods that developing countries can successfully export to the U.S., whether textiles from very low-wage countries or steel from Korea, Brazil and Russia. It marches in Seattle under the hypocritical (or to be more generous, simply erroneous) claim that it represents the interests of the world's workers, when it is in fact mostly representing its own members at the direct cost of much poorer workers in the developing world, and at the cost of U.S. consumers that would like to buy those less expensive goods from abroad. When President Clinton, in his inimitable way, feels...
...conclusion that the world, and the WTO negotiations, are a mix of principle and cynicism is pretty commonplace, but takes us only part of the way to understand the complexity of the debates in Seattle. There are a series of truly unsolved problems. Anti-WTO activists are wrong, as a point of fact, to see the WTO as a faceless bureaucracy setting the world's rules, but they are right that the negotiating process, by which the U.S. and other countries bargain over trade standards, is opaque and mostly hidden from view. Its not the WTO's bureaucracy...
...wants to press the WTO to adopt labor standards and environmental standards, but refuses to discuss standards on intellectual property and anti-dumping rules. The developing countries want it just the other way around. In a fair world, we'd consider all of these questions in a serious, transparent and careful way, with a deep attention to the concerns of the poorest countries, who live at just one hundredth of the dollar incomes enjoyed by Americans...