Hello, welcome to Cato Daily Podcast. Today is Friday, January 19th. I'm Anastasia Glova.

Recent meetings between U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab, WTO Director General Pascal

Lamy, and EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson have led to revived optimism about

the future of Doha.

The World Economic Forum is set to meet next week, which may lead to further developments

in trade negotiations.

Cato Trade Policy analyst Sally James joins us today to help sort out the rumors.

What spurred these hopes that the Doha Round may soon be revived?

A series of high-level meetings between European and American trade negotiators and obviously the President of the United States and the European Commission last week,

and from those meetings we saw the presence of

very strong rhetoric from especially US President Bush that he wants to see a

successful Doha round outcome.

The other thing we saw, or rather we didn't see,

was kind of the finger pointing and blame gaming

that we've seen from the US and the Europeans so far.

I think, on the other hand hand that what we haven't seen is significant

open shifts in positions from either of especially the Europeans and the United States

which are the two biggest players at the moment, we really

need to see shifts from those two and then other significant players will start to weigh in.

And we've not seen any open changes in positions from the Europeans and the United States

that have been publicized anyway so far and that will be necessary to get this round going.

U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab gave a speech at the WTO in which she spoke about

...