Should we be surprised that the Cancun WTO talks failed?

Cnn.com and other major news sources use the word “collapse.” The rich countries won’t give up their agricultural subsidies, some of the poor countries won’t open up their investment and procurement rules.

A recent IMF Working Paper, “The WTO Promotes Trade: Strongly but Unevenly,” by Arvind Subramaniam and Shang-Jin Wei (not on-line) provides an account of the longer history. In the early days of WTO (GATT), developed nations used the institution to reduce their average tariff barriers from 27 to 4.5 percent. Since that time the institution grew and deteriorated in quality: “our result is a more damning indictment of the WTO than even that in Rose [the link is from me, of course, not the authors of the paper]…He found that membership in the WTO had no significant effect on trade. We find that membership has a significantly negative effect on trade…”

It is the developing countries that drive the negative result. The authors emphasize that the result is not statistically robust, but in any case this is hardly a ringing endorsement of WTO.

Addendum: The paper is now on-line.