International trade & the WTO - short piece for context

 

World trade cop needs reform

Editorial
The Washington Post

The World Trade Organisation (WTO) is “sliding towards uselessness”, says The Washington Post. At its recent meeting, the WTO’s 164 members failed to make progress on “small yet crucial” issues, such as ending subsidies to fisheries that endanger the world’s fish stocks. Unless Washington “recovers its commitment to a rules-based trading system”, the organisation it “painstakingly” helped to build will be an irrelevance when it comes to global challenges such as artificial intelligence and climate change, both of which require international coordination. Far from any kind of coordination, rising tension between the US and China has “decimated” the WTO and rule flouting and unilateral decision-making is “becoming commonplace”. “The long-term cost of the world fragmenting into rival trading blocs” could amount to a “massive 7% of global economic output”. The WTO needs reform. It requires a better system to resolve trade disputes, a more nimble set-up so that groups of countries can make progress without “universal consensus”, and it must address China’s repeated attempts to tip the playing field in its favour. But abandoning it would be a “grave mistake”. The world needs a “multinational cop”.