The Doha round of negotiations on world trade liberalisation hinges on progress in farm-trade reform.
The main exception is Japan, where households still save 12% of their income, exactly the same as they did in 1990.Some of the decline in saving around the world reflects liberalisation of financial markets over the past two decades.
In a world of trade liberalisation and the proliferation of tax havens, there is very little states can now offer private capital that differentiates them and makes them a better candidate for investment.
The sections that follow will show how the cross-currents at work today are reshaping the energy world, from the liberalisation of power markets to the greening of the world's oil giants and the advance of disruptive innovations such as fuel cells and distributed power.
Britain, the only big west European country that could have joined the oil producers' club OPEC, the country that used to lecture the world about energy liberalisation, is heading towards South African-style power cuts, with homes and factories plunged intermittently into third-world darkness.In this section America's unjust sex laws Unbalanced Germany How long till the lights go out?
And even then an agreement was reached only when other parties caved in to demands from India, whose politicians stubbornly insisted on getting an indefinite exemption from WTO rules for its farm subsidies (see article).Beyond BaliThe action in the trade-liberalisation world these days is not inside the WTO but with regional agreements.
A Democrat-controlled Congress would pose a grave threat to the further liberalisation of world trade and so to world prosperity unless power prompted the party to become more responsible.Issue by issueOn microeconomic issues, the Democrats offer a grab-bag of policies.
In a few weeks, too, the WTO meeting opens in Seattle: a grand exercise in multilateralism for the best of purposes, the liberalisation of world trade.
It would be the survivors of this cut-throat process, not the three members of Mr Naikuni's cosy monopoly, who could then take on the rest of the world.But full liberalisation seems a long way off.
In Mr Clinton's view, fast-track authority is vital to America's leadership; further liberalisation of world trade is virtually impossible without it.In which case the administration was culpably negligent in leaving its effort so late.
