The meeting of the world’s trade ministers that ended on July 1 was meant to break the deadlock in the World Trade Organisation Doha round of negotiations but largely ended in failure. Ministers will try again next week but deadlock has pretty much marked all other such meetings over the past two years or so. These failures have not triggered discernible public clamour anywhere for the ministers to get the job done. This is perhaps not surprising from a public that seems more concerned with the foibles of film industry celebrities than a round of trade negotiations. Even so, it is worth asking why people, globally, seem so indifferent to the WTO negotiations; the public, after all stands to lose something like $287bn in possible gains from a successful negotiation.*
One possible reason for public indifference is that we have reached a point where the process of trade negotiations has become obsolete. This process has entailed telling the public what amounts to a massive lie, notably that the benefits from expanded trade are, for any nation, from expanded exports, but that these come at a necessary “cost” of expanded imports.
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