MOSCOW, August 3 (Itar-Tass) —— Russia’s accession of the World Trade Organization (WTO) will have a positive effect on economic ties with the United States but much will depend on the Jackson-Vanik amendment, Russian First Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Denisov said in an article published in the International Life magazine.
“Russia’s new trade and political status will have a considerable positive effect on economic ties with the United States, primarily in terms of their diversification,” Denisov wrote. “However this mighty potential currently depends on the actions by the American side, including on its vision of the future fate of the Jackson-Vanik amendment.”
According to the diplomat, the new economic realities after the launch of the Common Economic Space from January 2012 and the formation of the Eurasian Economic Union in a foreseeable perspective “require tuning of the existing algorithms of trade and economic cooperation between Russia and its key foreign partners.” “A new basic agreement with the European Union is now on the agenda,” he noted. “Russia’s membership in the World Trade Organization will lead to the modification of sectoral dialogues under the roadmap for the creation of a common economic space between Russia and the European Union.”
“Russia’s joining the WTO activities sends a strong positive signal to the global economy, which confirms that the Geneva format remains the core of the international trade system,” the Russian diplomat said. “Russia is joining the World Trade Organization at a crucial moment of its existence. The post-recession transformation of international economic ties forces the organization to actively search for a new identity. The work proceeds in the difficult conditions of growing crisis of the system of global management dominated by developed countries of the West.”
“The latest round of trade negotiations among the WTO membership, known as the Doha round, testifies to the serious nature of contradictions within the World Trade Organization,” Denisov pointed out. “It can be said that so far no compromise between the developed and developing member countries to change the agreements reached in the previous, Uruguay, round is on the agenda in Geneva.”
“No way out of the years-long blind end was found even at the peak of the global financial and economic crisis, when it became absolutely clear that it is vital to observe agreed rules of international trade and that unilateral populist moves are counter-productive,” he stressed. “In conditions that there are no visible perspectives for the WTO member states to reach breakthrough solutions on the Doha round agenda, experts are growing ever more confident that the age of large-scale multi-party trade agreements is over. At the same time, an alternative to the existing multi-party mechanism is regionalization of international trade cooperation, up to dividing into narrow-format groups by a geographical or a sectoral criteria, which means a rollback.”
“In this context, a fresh view, Russia’s active position on key challenges of the WTO agenda may make a considerable contribution to efforts to revive the Doha round of negotiations,” the Russian first deputy foreign minister concluded.