Economic Impact and Social Adjustment Costs of Accession to the World Trade Organisation

This paper focuses on the strengths and weaknesses of the WTOaccession process in light of the experiences of Cambodia and Nepal, the first two least developed countries (LDCs) to accede to the multila-teral trade organization. An analysis of Cambodia’s and Nepal’s terms of acces-sion confirms the general trend of exacting significant, “WTO+”, concessions from acceding countries. Both cases follow the trend, despite good intentions and calls for policy compassion embedded in the WTO accession guidelines of December 2002. Such guidelines do not appear to have yielded readily identifi-able, tangible results for the two acceding countries, nor do they appear to have specifically strengthened the countries ’ negotiating positions. The paper devotes particular attention to a number of structural shortcomings that current accession negotiations reveal when assessed from a development perspective and offers a number of ideas on how best to overcome the development deficit of current accession procedures, particularly as regards LDCs. The paper argues that greater (Continued on page 28