World trade: The other conclave | The Economist
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The other conclave
Can the WTO save itself from irrelevance?
Mar 16th 2013 | Washington, DC |From the print edition
THE World Trade Organisation’s general council will skip the plume of smoke when it chooses its new director-general in May. But what it would give for just a fraction of the attention bestowed this week on the cardinals gathered in the Vatican to choose a new pope. Since the Doha round of multilateral trade talks collapsed in 2008, the WTO has struggled to rebuild interest in broad liberalisation. The nine nominees to succeed Pascal Lamy in the WTO’s top job are busily campaigning for support in its Geneva headquarters and in member countries. The wider world isn’t much interested.