Trade Liberalization Wow Doha is dead, long live Doha; and Africa is a continental backwater -- all no more! Largely given up for dead, apparently the true believers in Geneva have continued to work and may have made some progress. The G-20, a consortium of rich and developing countries that share the attribute of overall economic size, has surfaced some proposals that seek to address real, trade impacting problems, and to do so as part of an early harvest package. One part addresses tariff rate quotas, synthetic protectionism tools intended to ease the burden of opening the market when simple tariffication was deemed too harsh. The problem with tariff-rate quotas (TRQs), as they are commonly administered, is that they are rarely filled...

TAGS – Softs