THE WORLD TRADE Organization's Doha Round has collapsed, perhaps terminally. This predictable failure reflects a much deeper malaise. Policies governing international trade and investment have become hopelessly outdated. They are stuck in anach-ronistic 20th-century mindsets, institutions and regulations, increasingly disconnected from today's business realities, WTO malfunction is symptomatic, but so is the profusion of commercially nonsensical preferential trade agreements (PTAS), agreements that (on the surface) offer free trade to members but (implicitly) protection against non-members. Doha Round negotiations have been bogged down in obscure discussions on "special and differential treatment," "aid for trade," "special products" and "sensitive products" in agriculture, not to mention mind-numbingly complicated coefficients for cutting tariffs and subsidies-all a world away from commercial realities outside Geneva, PTAS, meanwhile, are creating a veritable mess of bureaucratic regulations that threaten to compli-cate rather than simplify international commerce.
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