All entries for Tuesday 24 January 2006

Poor Nations & Negotiations

I came across an old post from Ben Muse quoting an FT article on the practical constraints of poor nations when it comes to participation in world trade discussions. From the point of view of Zambian trade minister Dipak Patel, it highlights how lack of money/staff staff and the resultant reliance on NGOs and foreign donors makes life difficult.

Patel starts working on a speech for the launch of a new handbook about a special preference scheme for African, Caribbean and Pacific countries,... He cites a computer simulation showing that EU demands for cuts in Zambian tariffs will lose the government $15m in precious tax revenue.

But Zambia’s ability to do such research is limited. It has access to an online computer model developed by the World Bank, which allows it to do simulations. “But I don’t have the bandwidth, so I often get cut off,” Patel says. He wanted to do a simulation of the effect of possible cuts in goods tariffs on the LDCs in time for the Livingstone conference, but had to run round the donors asking them to do it for him. It arrived just a couple of days before the meeting, undermining its usefulness.

Read it in full here.

: 24 Jan 2006 12:45 |  Tags: Economics Politics |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem