When trade ministers meet in the World Trade Organisation in Geneva next week, they will arrive with a set of marching orders from their bosses.
In Cannes last month, the Group of 20 leaders recognised that the present approach to the Doha round could not succeed and that the world would have to confront broader challenges facing the multilateral trading system. One of the biggest challenges is how to deal with the rise of China. Ministers, in our view, need to prepare for a new “China round” of multilateral trade negotiations.
China is the world’s largest exporter and by 2020 the country’s trade will be nearly one-and-a-half times as much as that of the US. China is set to become an economically dominant power. That in itself should not be a cause for worry because China’s economic transformation has been, and will remain, so predicated on an open trading system that Beijing will have a stake in preserving it.