What Multilateral Trading System for Future?
WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy, in a speech at Deutsche Bank in Berlin on 6 October 2011, said: “What we need is an international monetary system which facilitates international trade, cross border investment and a better allocation of capital across nations. What we need is a global monetary system, which inspires confidence and offers stability. One which provides the means by which global imbalances that risk endangering stability, can be addressed. Differently put, we need to do for international monetary relations what we already did for trade: move from the world of Hobbes towards the world of Kant. Trade is not immune to this global state of affairs. And here too, unilateral solutions will not work.”
He added, “the global trading system of the future will need to keep reducing obstacles to trade, in order to keep generating efficiencies and economies of scale, which remain an essential component of sustainable growth. We will need to complete our current unfinished business - tariff peaks and distorting subsidies — but beyond that we will have to focus more attention on non-tariff barriers. By this I mean obstacles to trade stemming from regulatory differences in areas such as food or product safety, consumer information or environmental protection. Regulations of this kind are legitimate and their purpose is usually to protect the consumer and not the producer. But if different standards proliferate, they come at a cost to trade, as the EU experience in creating the internal market showed”.