 So I'm going to be speaking today about the rise of China, India and Brazil at the WTO. So much of the discussion of the emerging powers has been dominated by what could be called the Goldman Sachs view of the BRICS. That this is primarily an economic phenomenon, a story about the rapid economic growth and investment opportunities presented by these countries. Following from this view, and now that the engine of growth has slowed in some of these countries, we're hearing a lot that the BRICS are dead, that the hype about the emerging economies was overblown, that it was all a mirage and illusion, etc. But what I would argue is that the emerging powers were never solely or most importantly a purely economic phenomenon. Far more important has been their political impact and specifically their impact on global economic governance. If we look at the multilateral trading system, we see that the impact of the emerging powers, particularly Brazil, India and China, has been profound. Brazil and India emerged as major players at the WTO relatively early in the Doha round of trade negotiations that began in 2001 and they played a very active agenda setting role. They led the developing world in pressing the US and other developed countries to reduce their agriculture subsidies and succeeded in securing substantial special and differential treatment for developing countries across all aspects of the negotiations. Brazil and India had a major influence on the evolution of the round and in shaping the substance and content of the draft Doha agreement. With the result that the deal that emerged was widely considered a relatively good one for developing countries. It contained meaningful reductions in rich country agriculture subsidies and significant gains in market access across all of the negotiating areas. And its substantial special and differential treatment provisions meant comparatively little liberalization would be required of developing countries. So in 2008, the WTO looked close to finalizing the agreement and concluding the round. And most states were relatively satisfied with the deal on the table. But it was at that point that the US was the one who balked. And it did so specifically because of China. The reason is that the world had changed radically since the start of the round in ways that had significant implications for how the US came to see the deal on the table. So China joined the WTO in 2001 right at the start of the Doha round. And the US had been a major advocate and driver of China's accession. Concerned about its trade deficit, the US thought that it could make major gains in the Chinese market for its manufactured exports, as well as in other areas like services and intellectual property. The US thought China's WTO accession would boost US exports and actually help to ameliorate its trade deficit. But what in fact happened is that China's exports exploded following its WTO accession, as you can see. And over this same time period, the US has seen a significant decline in its share of global manufacturing. It had been the world's largest manufacturer, even as late as 2000. But over the course of the Doha round, it came to be eclipsed by China. So contrary to what the US had expected, the trade deficit with China has grown dramatically. And as we see, 2001, the point of China's accession to the WTO was really a major inflection point. So in this context, the text of the Doha agreement on the table at the WTO in 2008 and since then had by this point become politically untenable to the US. Under the terms of the proposed agreement, China would be entitled to the same substantial special interventional treatment that developing countries had been able to secure in the round, in large part due to pressures from Brazil and India as these leaders of the developing world. So from the US perspective, it would be making significant real concessions in opening its markets, but see relatively little or no concessions from China in return. The US became unwilling to extend that kind of lessenful reciprocity to a country that it now had come to see as its key competitor and the key threat to its hegemony. The US began to demand additional liberalization from China in manufacturing and agriculture in order to try to rebalance the deal. But China refused. From its perspective, this was a violation of the development agenda of the round, as well as a violation of the implicit bargain that was struck during its accession, where in exchange for the deep concessions China was forced to make, it was promised that it would essentially be paid back during the Doha round. So from China's point of view, the US was essentially trying to renege on both of those promises. And China now has sufficient power to be able to stand up to the US and refuse to concede to its demands. So the result has been a clash between the old and the new powers. With the US on one side, with some support from other advanced industrial states, demanding additional liberalization from China, as well as the other emerging economies. And for the first time, these two sides are relatively evenly matched, such that neither has been able to overpower the other. So this is a reason for the stalemate and collapse of the Doha round in 2008. And this same underlying conflict has been the basis of the continued impasse of the WTO since then. So coming back to the point I started with, the emerging powers are clearly not just a mirage. The rise of new powers has had a profound impact on the WTO and led to the breakdown of the Doha round. So what I would argue is that their contemporary power shifts have presented three key challenges for the multilateral trading system. First, can the trading system adapt to, manage and accommodate growing economic rivalry between the US and China? This clash of a hegemon and its emerging challenger. This is a key part of the conflict that broke the Doha round. And it persists today as a major impediment to progress in the WTO negotiations. Most recently, for example, this has been a key source of conflicts and competing progress on efforts to negotiate new disciplines on agriculture domestic support. Very recently in the past couple of years of the WTO. This conflict between the US and China. Second, a second major and related question is how should China and the other emerging economies be classified and treated in global trade governance? These countries face significant poverty and development challenges, but they're also increasingly economic powerhouses and major competitors. Should they be treated as developing countries and therefore entitled to the same special and differential treatment as other developing countries, granted the same flexibilities, shielded from liberalization? Or should there be differentiation among developing countries and the emerging economies subject to stricter commitments closer to those of developed countries? This is a core issue at the heart of the Doha round breakdown. The US and other advanced industrialized states have been willing to extend extensive special and differential treatment to much of the developing world, but far less willing to do so for China and other emerging challengers. And I think we see similar tensions over how to treat the emerging economies in other areas of global governance, such as the international climate change negotiations. And finally, is there a fundamental conflict between liberal governance institutions and development? For several decades under the Washington consensus, the multilateral economic institutions like the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank operated under the principle that liberalism, open markets and free trade, offers the path to development. So within a neoliberal development paradigm, the WTO's objective of liberalizing trade and the goal of fostering development appear highly compatible. But that faith in free market economics is increasingly being destabilized by the success of countries such as China that have deviated quite far from the principles of liberalism, by the success of other heavily interventionist developmental states, and by the rise of the new structural economics, and new ideas about the importance of an active state and industrial policy, some of which has been coming out of UNU wider. So there's a growing consensus that development requires significant scope for state intervention. Can that be accommodated in or reconciled with governance institutions predicated on liberal principles that equate government intervention with protectionism? To provide an example to make this more concrete, a key point of conflict in the Doha Round Breakdown in 2008 was that in order to ensure that its industries saw gains from the round, the US pushed China to engage in sectorals, aggressive liberalization in specific industrial sectors to reduce tariffs to zero, in two key areas where the US has a competitive advantage, chemicals and industrial machinery. China refused because these are key sectors is trying to foster as part of its industrial upgrading strategy. If it opened to those sectors now, relinquishing its infant industry protections, they would likely be wiped out by US competition, and that could seriously arrest China's economic development. So this conflict contributed to the breakdown in 2008, and it's been a factor in the impasse of the WTO since then. And I think this highlights the deep tension between the pursuit of liberalization via the WTO and the development strategies of emerging economies and increasingly the developing world more broadly. So I'll conclude there and look forward to a further discussion.