Tufts: No Fast Track to Global Poverty Reduction

The good folks over at Tufts University's Global Development and Environment Institute have posted a new policy brief (PDF) showing that the WTO Doha Round's emphasis as a "development round" aimed at helping poor countries is more or less a sham. For instance:

If you were a typical poverty-level farmer or worker in the developing world making $100 per month (roughly $4 per day to support your family), your gains from a successful WTO negotiation would be a raise of sixteen cents a month – $100.16... Following negotiations supposedly focused on developing country needs, rich countries are projected to receive an embarrassing 25 times the per-capita gains of developing countries. That’s right: we get $79 each a year, they get $3.

Their conclusion? "Extending the President's trade promotion authority to complete an agreement so hostile to true economic development and so inefectual in reducing global poverty would be a sad mistake." That's pretty clear-cut, huh?