For their part the EU, Japan and other WTO members called for a revoking of US antidumping laws, but the US government, under strong domestic pressure, opposed this. Many developed countries sought to link trade to worker's rights with the goal of enforcing a global labor standard, while developing countries, led by India and Egypt, refused this idea outright.
From the perspective of political economy, the WTO exists to overcome a classical dilemma for policy reform, which dictates that the costs of trade liberalization fall upon a few import-competing interests but the benefits are distributed thinly across mass consumers.
Consumers therefore have little incentive to stand up together against the opponents. In the past, the WTO successfully facilitated trade reform by changing the political equation to generate support for multilateral trade agreements. These agreements created a set of concentrated "winners" in member countries.
They are the exporting firms and multinationals. They stand to benefit from lower tariffs in potential export markets and therefore have an incentive to oppose import-competing firms.
Unfortunately, in the Seattle trade talks, the political balance was tilted against the exporting firms and multinationals, as the aforementioned economic and non-economic agenda was put on the table.
China is to complete its WTO accession next year. As the largest emerging market in the world, China has a notorious record of disobeying international norms. It is believed that China would complicate international powers' political wrestling due to its deep-rooted problems with human rights, labor standards, environmental protection, lax enforcement of intellectual property rights, and reforms of state-owned enterprises.
For sure, the undercurrent of global trade reform will be turbulent, as the world sails into the next century.
Lin Hwan-chiang is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of North Carolina.
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