He's also very critical of the U.S. use of the WTO to tighten intellectual property restrictions and of the confusion of capital account liberalization with trade liberalization. He's not a wind-up free-trader.
Jagdish Bhagwati wrote [my remarks in brackets]:
"The starvation of the WTO and the financial indulgence of the Bretton Woods institutions are not fortuitous. The influential Quad powers -- the EU, the United States, Japan, and Canada -- will resolutely not augment the absurdly lean WTO budget. This, of course, reflects the cynical business of voting. At Bretton Woods institutions, it is weighted. At the WTO, things work by consensus. You do not need to be a profound observer to predict that resources and action will go then to the Bretton Woods institutions. We therefore have the supreme incoherence, some would call it even hypocrisy, of the richest nations asking the WTO to undertake sophisticated studies and to manage a Social Clause while denying the WTO resources to do this or pretty much anything else. Evidently, the WTO then must take on these agendas but rely for their management (under the high-sounding rubric of "policy coordination") on the foreign legion of a (G7-dominated and hence "reliable") leadership and staff at the World Bank and the IMF.
"If you think that I am exaggerating, let me cite you just one telling example. As regards intellectual property protection (IPP), demanded insistently by the United States and then by other rich countries, most economists believe that having patents at twenty-year length (as put into the WTO) is, from the viewpoint of worldwide efficiency, suboptimal, just as having no patents almost certainly is also. Many also consider it to be a transfer from most of the poor countries to the rich ones and hence as an item that does not belong to the WTO, whose organizing principle should be the inclusion of mutually gainful transactions, as indeed noncoercive trade is. But the only institution whose staff was allowed to write clearly and skeptically about it at the time of the Uruguay Round was the GATT, whereas the World Bank played along with IPP, even trying to produce reasons why it was good for the poor countries. Even now, despite all the talk about poverty alleviation, the World Bank's staff, research, and aid are being used, I suspect, in a way that, instead of calling into serious doubt the economic logic of IPP, can be interpreted as contributing to the know-how that will eventually enable rich countries to get poor countries to set up administrative machinery to enforce intellectual property rights for the benefit of the rich countries."
Julio
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