Failed WTO talks equal more imbalance of trade

When the World Trade Organization talks collapsed in Seattle in 1999, there were parties in the streets and a wailing in the corridors of power. The failure of the Doha Round of WTO talks in Geneva last week has drawn a more muted reaction from both its champions and critics.

In Seattle, it was possible to tell a story in which the voices of people on the streets mattered, in which the disenfranchised had scored a victory against an unaccountable agent for international capital. This failure had less to do with global justice, and more to do with the growing pains of international capitalism.

To the untrained eye, it's hard to tell that anything's different. Today's ducks of international capital still look, walk and quack the same. The financial markets didn't seem to care, with major indexes untroubled. In part, this is because the contribution that the Doha Round would have made to a global economy of $54 trillion, by the WTO's own generous figures, is a mere $50 billion.