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WTO Director-General: Pascal Lamy Pascal Lamy is the fifth Director-General of the WTO. His appointment took effect on 1 September 2005 for a four-year term. |
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> Online chat with Pascal Lamy: 18 October 2006 |
A world trade system for the benefit of all Dear visitor, welcome to my website, I believe that trade opening and reducing trade barriers, has been, is and will remain, essential to promote growth and development, to improve standards of living and to tackle poverty reduction. The World Trade Organization remains the most efficient and most legitimate forum to open and regulate world trade. The most efficient because it works at the service of all the participants and because of its modern system to solve trade disputes. The most legitimate, because it is the fairest system of all, as all the decisions are taken by all the members, large or small, strong or weak. But although the opening up of markets produces benefits to many, it also creates adjustments costs which we cannot ignore. These adjustments must not be relegated to the future: they must be an integral part of the opening-up agenda. This is what I call the “Geneva consensus”: a belief that trade opening works for development but only if we address the imbalances it creates between winners and losers, imbalances that are all the more dangerous the more fragile the economies, societies or countries. This is the only way to ensure that the opening up of markets will produce real benefits to all people in their everyday lives.
Pascal Lamy
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