Its prospects look dim at the moment, if only because the three big North-East Asian economies China, Japan and South Korea seem more likely to go to war with each other than to make historic trade breakthroughs.DreamlandHowever, the two routes to Asian trade liberalisation are ever more widely seen as yet another facet of Sino-American rivalry.
Far less clear is whether the prisoner trade augurs a breakthrough in the stillborn US-Taliban diplomacy, laundered through Qatar.
In farm trade, this week's breakthrough on the technicalities of tariff conversion merely opens the door to the real haggling over how to structure tariff cuts for farm goods.
Yet they acknowledge that the future here of Nike Inc. has grown cloudier because of the Hanoi government's reluctance to sign a breakthrough trade agreement with the United States.
BUSINESS DAY, PAGE C1 Breakthrough on Trade Officials from more than 140 nations plan to topple tariffs and liberalize trade on everything from wheat to insurance policies.
Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said the vote was a "very significant" breakthrough for trade.
Nevertheless, on their long journey of rivalry and reconciliation, the reopening of the trade route represents a breakthrough for India and Pakistan, especially because it follows fresh acrimony.
The hopes for a breakthrough on trade have since faded.Both Julia Gillard and the leader of Australia's conservative opposition, Tony Abbott, talk about finding a "regional solution" to Australia's refugee problem.
In the summer of 1997, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani hailed the decision by a securities firm called Exco P.L.C. to move hundreds of employees from Jersey City to the World Trade Center as a breakthrough and rewarded the company with millions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives.
As he prepared to leave Tokyo, negotiators ended talks on the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation trade deal, without the breakthrough for which White House aides had hoped.
