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When no agreement can be reached no agreement is necessary trade barriers should be lowered

regardless of whether once trading partners make concessions so argues Professor

Jugdish Pagwati a member of the Advisory Board at the Cato Center for Trade Policy Studies in going alone, the case for relaxed reciprocity in freeing trade.

In a phone interview with the Cato Institute, Professor Brigitte explains why unilateral liberalization is the way to go.

You've produced extensive research most recently culminating in the book Going Alone, in which you've made the case again and again that trade is good and free trade is even better

After what happened at the Doha round how do we get there? Oh the Doha round is still not dead.

I mean, you know, do you frequently get deadlines

which are not filled?

This happened with Euro-Oru-Oru-E-RAN

which went on for over eight years

and before that the Tokyo round was about five years so this is still in our

fifth year of negotiations and I think the real deadline at the moment is this

really end of July and so people will probably come back but the main problem of course is that all the countries

which you're in real play in terms of making concessions, which is of course the wrong kind of word

to use, because trade liberalization, your own trade liberalization is good

for you also.

So the language of concessions is in a sense slightly misleading to say the least.

So I think what you have is a situation where people are

still not willing to play and I think they're still holding their cards close to the

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