The Still‐​Frozen Dohapsicle Round

After nine days of trying to reanimate the cryogenically preserved Doha Round, negotiators are calling it quits again.

I have sympathy for the well-intentioned, hard-working members of those trade delegations who hoped to finally nail down the structure of a Doha Round agreement in Geneva this week. Unfortunately for them, their counterparts included too many pretenders who were more interested in using the stage provided by the negotiations to make political statements for the crowds back home.

The fact that after several days of progress the talks broke down over failure to bridge gaps on what should have been a small caveat provision proves that the political costs of a successful outcome overshadowed the political benefits for some countries.

But there are some silver linings. International trade flows continue to grow faster than the global economy, which has been moving forward at a decent clip this decade. Cross-border investment, too, continues to increase. All of those trends have been facilitated by reforms undertaken unilaterally by countries around the world. And there is every reason to believe that those trends will continue, and perhaps even accelerate while Doha sleeps.