Australia-USA Free Trade: Competitive Liberalisation at Work in 2003

little less than two years after its launch, the World Trade Organisation's latest round of multilateral trade negotiations, the 'Doha Development Agenda', has failed to live up to original expectations. The collapse of the Cancun Ministerial meeting in September, coming on top of missed negotiating deadlines earlier in 2003, has lowered expectations and made completing the round on schedule (before the end of 2004) problematic. Meanwhile, Australia and the United States, arguably two of the strongest supporters of the multilateral trading system are each working hard on a number of preferential trade arrangements (PTAs) -a term which will be used to refer to those bilateral and plurilateral trade agreements envisaged in the WTO GATT 1994 (Article XXIV) and GATS (Article V) Agreements. Although customs unions will be included by reference, the bulk of the discussion will be directed at free trade agreements that do not call for common external levels of protection. One of the more significant of these efforts is the negotiation of a bilateral Australia-US free trade agreement (AUSFTA) linking the two countries in what would be a combined market of over 300 million consumers.