The Doha Development Agenda - Impacts on Trade and Poverty

The Doha Round of the World Trade Organization was named the Development Agenda, but there are clear divergences of interests among developing countries. The slow progress of the negotiations, the breakdown at Cancún, and the uneasy compromise reached in July 2004 confirmed that we must look at different parts of the agenda and different groups of countries in order to determine who benefits. Even where trade reforms unambiguously improve total world welfare, the distribution among countries may leave some losers, and even in countries that gain, some may lose.

In this collection of papers we summarise our assessments of the principal issues of the WTO round, how the outcome might affect poverty, the progress of the negotiations, and the impact on four very different countries.