A China Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations Aaditya Mattoo and Arvind Subramanian Abstract Until recently, the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been an effective framework for cooperation because it has continually adapted to changing economic realities. The current Doha Agenda is an aberration because it does not reflect one of the biggest shifts in the international economic and trading system: the rise of China. Even though China will have a stake in maintaining trade openness, an initiative that builds on but redefines the Doha Agenda would anchor China more fully in the multilateral trading system. Such an initiative would have two pillars. First, a new negotiating agenda that would include the major issues of interest to China and its trading partners, and thus unleash the powerful reciprocal liberalization mechanism that has driven the WTO process to previous successes. Second, new restraints on bilateralism and regionalism that would help preserve incentives for maintaining the current broad non-discriminatory trading order. JEL Codes: F1, F2, F5 Keywords: China, trade, multilateralism, WTO, Doha agenda Working Paper 277 www.cgdev.org December 2011 A China Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations Aaditya Mattoo World Bank Arvind Subramanian Center for Global Development Aaditya Mattoo works with the Development Economics Research Group, World Bank. Email:
[email protected]. Arvind Subramanian is senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Email:
[email protected]. The authors are grateful to Richard Baldwin, C. Fred Bergsten, Chad Bown, Bernard Hoekman, Gary Hufbauer, Pascal Lamy, Patrick Low, Will Martin, Zanny Minton-Beddoes, and Martin Wolf for helpful discussions and useful comments, and, in particular, to an anonymous referee for detailed comments.