Five hypotheses concerning the fate of the Singapore issues in the Doha Round

At the Cancn Ministerial Conference, the members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) disagreed on whether to launch negotiations on multilateral disciplines concerning the four areas of government policy collectively known as the Singapore issues. This amounted to a decision not to expand the WTOs boundaries along these dimensions. In this paper, five hypotheses concerning the treatment of the Singapore issues by the WTOs membership are described and assessed. The implications of this assessment for the likelihood that, at some future date, similar proposals can be successfully advanced in the multilateral trade arena are also discussed.