Capping Unusually High Tariffs: The WTO Doha Round and ‘Tariff Peaks’
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Capping Unusually High Tariffs: The WTO Doha Round and ‘Tariff Peaks’ PDF • 0.92 MBThis information note examines the proposed tariff cap and what this would mean for countries with extremely high tariffs. The tariff peaks of Iceland, Japan, Norway and Switzerland are examined in closer detail.
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This paper is excellent. It is an excellent description of the way that the introduction of so many exceptions in the Doha Round agriculture negotation has led to a text that would be a failure in so many ways. The paper could go a step further to state that the negotiation looks set to miss out on the biggest potential gains from liberalization because it would leave almost untouched most of the highest rates of protection in many countries. Everyone involved in the Round needs to think hard about how to make the system work to achieve reductions of the highest rates of protection along with the rest. Clearly the path taken in this Round is not the best path. We would have been better not to utilize the concepts of sensitve or special products at all but just to have tariff cuts at a less ambitious level for all countries and all products. It would have been better to accept a slow rate of gradual tariff reductions by all countries on everything instead of this attempt at ambitious reductions which in the end fails to achieve most of the potential economic gains because it allows too many exceptions.