government fear would reduce their chances of remaining in power (and possibly their own wealth in countries where corruption is rife). The challenge involves finding politically attractive ways to phase out remaining distortions to world markets for goods and services, including for the capital and labour used to produce those products.

This challenge is even greater now than it was in the inaugural Copenhagen Consensus project four years ago. One reason is that the WTO membership is struggling to address the Doha Development Agenda that was launched in the immediate aftermath of 11 September 2001 – a time when there was much more goodwill to cooperate multilaterally than seems to be the case now. Another reason is greater doubts about the wisdom in predominantly Christian western countries of allowing more immigrants from Moslem countries where recent global terrorism seems to have emerged. More generally, this is but part of a broader disenchantment with globalization that could result not just in a failure to reach agreement under the Doha round to multilaterally liberalize trade, but also in the _raising_ of current trade and immigration barriers. Such a reversal of past reforms could do huge damage to the global trading system and raise global inequality. That suggests the counterfactual to opening markets is not the status quo but something potentially much worse than the present.

Evidence of anti-globalization sentiment abounds despite the lowered frequency and ferocity of public protests of the sort first seen at the WTO’s Trade Ministerial in Seattle in 1999 and annual meetings on the World Bank and IMF early this decade.<sup>2</sup> One recent example is a Financial Times/Harris poll in the United States and the five largest European countries, where those polled were nearly three times more likely to say globalization was having a negative rather than a positive effect on their countries (Giles 2007). Such attitudes contributed to the decision at the June 2007 Summit of EU leaders to bend to France’s demand to drop the principle of free and undistorted competition from the treaty that, if ratified, will replace the EU constitution that was voted down by French and Dutch voters in 2005. Another example is the threat by members of the US congress to impose arbitrary trade barriers on products flooding in from China and to oppose liberal trade initiatives by the Bush Administration (e.g., for several bilateral free-trade agreements and for comprehensive immigration reform).

These and similar examples underscore the need to re-emphasize the virtues of a more open global trading system – a system to which around 70 additional developing and transition economies have subscribed since the WTO came into being in 1995, with a further 28 (including Russia) currently striving to join. The case needs to be made within the context of the on-going information and communication technology (ICT) revolution that is globalizing the world’s economies ever-more rapidly<sup>3</sup> and, via the internet, exposing differences in living standards to ever-more

> 2 That clash between the key international financial institutions and civil society groups is ironic since both seek the same outcome, namely a reduction in global poverty. As pointed out by Kanbur (2001), this common goal suggest there is much scope for the two groups to discuss their differences in views as to the best means to that end. And indeed they have been in much closer dialogue in recent years, a result of which has been some convergence of views on the policy reforms needed to promote pro-poor economic development.

> 3 So rapid is this phenomenon that one author has felt the need to revise his popular book on the subject three times in three years (Friedman 2007). Its influence on fragmenting the process of production has been sufficiently profound for economists to begin developing a theory of trade in ‘tasks’, to capture the fact that firms are offshoring an increasing array of their activities (e.g., Grossman and RossiHansberg 2006).

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