Doha Development Round: Why did it fail?

Text Sample:
Introduction:
The Doha Development Agenda (DDA) (commonly referred to as Doha Development Round or simply Doha Round), may go down in history as the slowest development round of all times. Starting in 2001, negotiations have been going on for 13 years and collapsed on several occasions in the meantime. With regards to its goal to ensure developing countries, and especially the least-developed among them, a share in the growth of world trade, barely any progress was made. To the extent that one may question how legitimate it is to call the Doha Round a Development Round at all. Especially the notorious point of trade liberalization in agriculture has delayed the negotiations. While the WTO member states agreed on cutting tariffs and reducing agricultural subsidies, opinions differ sharply on exemptions for certain products from these broad ruled. In another critical point, services, negotiations have hardly progressed. The WTO negotiators have missed every deadline agreed upon and various observers suggested to drop the entire venture. The aim of this paper is to find the reasons for the slow progress in order to see if the obstacles may be overcome and the Doha Round might be completed successfully.
In the first chapter we will have a closer look at the Uruguay Round, the immediate processor of the Doha Round, then, in the second chapter the Doha rounds progress will be analyzed in its key fields, implementation, agriculture, NAMA, services and LDCs. The third chapter is a brief summary of the Bali agreement, the first multilateral agreement of the Doha Round and finally we will evaluate specific obstacles hindering the trade round in chapter 4. In the conclusion our main findings will be presented.
Chapter 1: Pre Doha The Uruguay Round:
The Doha round is now older than the preceding Uruguay round, which lasted almost 8 years and seemed at the time an Odyssey itself. The broad mandate of the Uruguay Round had been to extend the General Agreement on

Anna Richter was born in Heidelberg, Germany in 1991.She grew up in Dresden and La Palma (Canary Islands). After graduating from high-school in Spain, Miss Richter studied Arabic studies at the University of Manchester. She studied and researched for one year at the University of Jordan in Amman and travelled extensively. Besides interning at various government institutions she is currently pursuing her Master s degree in Middle Eastern Economics at the Friedrich Alexander University Nuremberg-Erlangen.