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As I also wrote about three weeks ago, the Group of 20 (G20) nations recently concluded its summit. The most interesting piece of news in this story to me was the commitment by the G20 member nations, however thin, to kick-start the Doha development round of the World Trade Organization by reducing its protectionist demands.
I recently represented India in a mock-WTO summit in an International Economic Institutions class here at Boston College with professor David Deese, who literally wrote the book on the subject. The exercise provided a good viewpoint into the problems of the developing world, and I want to share some background on the WTO negotiations because they don’t get talked about very much.
The Doha Development Round of the World Trade Organization is the current round of negotiations between WTO member states that begun in 2001 in Doha, Qatar (and since held in Cancun and Hong Kong) that aims to better integrate developing nations into the world economy through trade liberalization that is more amenable to the struggles of developing countries.
India is in a precarious position in these negotiations. One of the world’s two countries with over a billion people (third is the U.S., with just over 300,000), India is essentially an increasingly developed country sitting atop a massive developing one. It is partly developed, with a highly capable technology industry and a burgeoning front for big businesses; but that developed portion sits atop a country of 650 million farmers (double the population of the United States).
How will the G20 (and through it, the developing world to some degree) balance these divergent needs as it attempts to ascend to a position of global policy leadership?
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