“Free trade is the most dependable wealth creator ever devised,” says The Times. “And it is under threat.” The latest round of global trade talks, known as the Doha round, collapsed last year. It is estimated that they would have added around $1.5trn a year to global GDP (currently around $77trn). That marked the first failure of a multilateral trade negotiation since the 1930s.
A trade deal between 12 countries around the Pacific Rim, including the US, looks “doomed”, says Liam Halligan in The Sunday Telegraph, while EU-US negotiations for another deal have been virtually abandoned. Both US presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, are campaigning against free trade – “a first in post-war American history”.
The drift towards protectionism
has been going on ever since the financial crisis, says Satyajit Das on Bloomberg.com. Between 2009 and 2015, three times as many discriminatory trade measures were introduced as liberalising ones.
There were 539 of the former in the first ten months of 2015 alone, according to the Global Trade Alert database. Throw in lacklustre global growth since the crisis, and it’s no wonder that the World Trade Organisation expects the worldwide value of imports and exports to expand by just 1.8% this year, down from an earlier estimate of 2.8%. Trade growth will fall to a post-crisis low and expand more slowly than global GDP for the first time this century – a tough backdrop for post-Brexit global trade deals.