16 countries seek WTO benign eye on small economies

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New Delhi, Feb 22: A group of sixteen countries including Sri Lanka, Mauritius, Jamaica, Cuba and Paraguay have submitted a joint paper to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) listing suggestions for implementation of the special dispensation for small economies provided for in the Doha declaration.

The Doha ministerial declaration, which launched a fresh round of extended negotiations at the WTO in November 2001, had indicated that members should frame responses to trade-related issues identified for the fuller integration of small, vulnerable economies into the multilateral trading system.

The paper, which is also co-sponsored by Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Bolivia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Fiji, Guatemala, Honduras, Mongolia, Nicaragua, and Trinidad and Tobago, was submitted to the work programme on small economies at the WTO last week.

Taking into account the work already undertaken in the dedicated sessions of the Committee on Trade and Development on these issues, the paper suggested that the work of the committee should be approached in three stages.

It proposed that certain characteristics to identify the small and vulnerable economies should be considered first.

Second on the list of considerations should be identification of trade-related problems that could, reasonably, be attributed to such characteristics.

Lastly, appropriate systemic responses to these problems should be designed, the paper said. Care should be maintained to carry out these exercises without any individual mention of a country or group of countries, it added.

The paper also gave an indicative list of specific characteristics and problems of small economies.

The characterisation of small economies should take into account physical isolation, geographical dispersal and distance from the main markets. Many are small island or landlocked developing countries, it pointed out.