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The hurricane tearing through financial markets has had a muted impact so far on trade flows.
But with inadequate regulation widely blamed for the biggest financial disaster since the 1929 Wall Street Crash, the debacle is reinforcing calls to strengthen the rules of commerce by agreeing a new trade deal.
"If we can conclude the negotiation we can send a positive signal to the world economy, to business people, because the Doha round is a round of liberalisation of trade and investment," said China's deputy World Trade Organisation (WTO) ambassador, Xiang Zhang.
Conversely, failure to agree a deal now after seven years could lead to a new crisis of confidence in business, said Zhang, who was instrumental in steering China into the WTO.
WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy still hopes to reach an outline deal on agriculture and industrial goods by the end of the year in the WTO's Doha round, launched in 2001, even though ministers failed to secure a breakthrough in July.
Both Lamy and EU trade chief Peter Mandelson warned last week the fin-ancial crisis could fan protectionism, which would hurt economic growth, making a new trade deal to secure the benefits of globalisation all the more urgent.
The crisis could also monopolise the attention of countries' leaders, distracting them from trade issues and getting a deal.
Agreement on a proposed $700 billion (Dh2.57 trillion) bailout for the US financial industry, which could be announced on Sunday, would go some way to easing that concern.
Delayed response
Any trade deal, which would not be finalised until well into 2009 or even 2010 at the earliest, would not have an immediate impact on flows because of implementation periods of 5 years for rich countries and up to 17 years for developing nations.
That delayed economic effect would also argue against any immediate fin-ancial market impact, as exchange rates or company earnings would respond only later to changing trade flows.
A deal would boost business confidence, by showing that barriers to business were coming down, that the world trading system was in good shape, and that the international community was able to cooperate to solve global problems, experts said.
In any case, existing WTO deals limit the extent to which countries can raise tariffs, said Fredrik Erixon, head of Brussels trade policy think-tank ECIPE.
"I don't think we are going to see a 1930s repetition where a financial crisis is going to lead to tit-for-tat economic nationalism as it did then," he said.
The prospects for a new trade deal opening up markets may not seem propitious in a climate where deregulation is blamed for the crisis, and Anglo-Saxon laissez-faire liberalisation has has come under attack from French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck.
That atmosphere could hurt one aspect of the talks - liberalising trade in fin-ancial services, diplomats said. But, at a meeting in July where governments signalled a readiness to open up markets to different services, the credit crunch did not seem to force negotiators to hold back on banking.
In any case, there is a difference between market access, which is what trade negotiations are about, and financial contagion, which is a matter for regulators, said John Cooke, chairman of the Liberalisation of Trade in Services Committee, which promotes UK financial services around the world.
"The fact remains that the world will continue to globalise: with more trade and investment there will be more international dependencies between the real economies of different economies," said Cooke. "And, as trade and investment develop, they have to be financed."
Trade rounds are not just about liberalising commerce but also about drawing up rules for the international trading system that are fair to all countries.
Reform of rules
For instance in the current Doha round developing countries are seeking the reduction of rich nations' agricultural subsidies, which artificially depress prices, squeezing farmers in poor countries out of the market.
Munir Ahmad, secretary-general of the International Textiles and Clothing Bureau, compared such subsidies to short-selling, where investors borrow and sell shares they believe overvalued, hoping to buy them back at a lower price and pocket the difference. The practice has been widely blamed for falls in bank stocks in recent weeks.
"The first casualty of a failed Doha round would be the loss of opportunity to set regulations on many areas of international commerce," said Ahmad, a former Pakistani ambassador to the WTO.
The financial crisis also adds urgency to a Doha deal by serving as a reminder that good times do not last forever. With business booming over the past few years, many companies have seen little need to push for reform in trade rules that would prevent a resurgence of protectionism.
So businesses have not lobbied as aggressively for a deal as in previous rounds, and so governments may have felt under less pressure to conclude one. That would mean that unilateral tariff and subsidy cuts they have made could be reversed.
"If the financial world goes backwards you can go backwards, and the only bulwark against that is to shrink down the entitlements that people have to go backwards," said New Zealand's WTO ambassador, Crawford Falconer, who chairs agriculture negotiations at the WTO.
"I think that's an added reason, not the only reason, it's an added reason which I think has more force than ever before for getting this damned job done now."
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