When the World Trade Organization (WTO) was created, its members agreed to hold a 'ministerial conference' composed of representatives of all the members, at least once every two years. The first such 'ministerial' was scheduled for December 1996 in Singapore.

The Singapore ministerial will include plenary meetings and various multilateral, plurilateral and bilateral sessions. It will allow members to assess the progress of Uruguay Round implementation and the institutional development of the WTO. It will also provide an opportunity to define the multilateral agenda.

According to Joseph Francois and Bradley McDonald, there are actually two agendas to be set: first, the agenda for the Singapore meetings themselves; and second, the multilateral work programme for the WTO and its members.

The agenda for the meeting of trade ministers in Singapore is far-reaching. It includes not only traditional matters like tariffs and non-tariff barriers, but also new issues that may or may not be on the formal programme, though some countries will be pressing them nonetheless. These include anti-dumping, and the relationships between trade and the environment, trade and employment, trade and competition policy, and trade and investment.

These items may yield a work programme that is too broad and cumbersome to be effectively managed. The trade ministers in Singapore must decide how to balance the need to pursue traditional issues – such as monitoring of Uruguay Round commitments to tariff reductions and upcoming scheduled agricultural negotiations – with new issues such as environmental and labour standards.

There is a significant amount of 'old business' from the Uruguay Round already on the agenda. This includes the monitoring of scheduled reductions in tariffs, the scheduled elimination of the Multi-Fibre Agreement (MFA) on textiles and clothing products by 2005, the replacement of all agricultural protection by tariffs, and commitments to liberalize or at least freeze the status quo regarding market access in certain services.

Implementing the results of the Uruguay Round also means continuing negotiations. There is a 'pre-programmed' set of future negotiations in agriculture and services, and there is the very real potential for a forced set of textile and clothing negotiations if the scheduled phasing out of the MFA does not go smoothly. Several institutional changes also need to be examined and evaluated, not the least of which is the operation of the new dispute settlement mechanism.

Several issues of 'new business' will also be explored in Singapore. Trade and the environment is not strictly speaking a new agenda item since it already has an established place in the WTO's work programme. Some aspects of trade and investment were also covered to some extent in the Uruguay Round, though further inclusion is a contentious issue.

The debate on trade and competition policy is even less mature, as is that on mutual recognition of standards. The trade and labour standards issue seems to be beyond the pale of subjects that most members are ready to explore.

Each of these 'new business' items has the potential to consume a great deal of otherwise limited negotiating energy and capital. To the extent that their examination goes beyond the WTO's basic mandate to promote open markets, the members will be exploring relatively uncharted territory potentially without the promise of immediate returns.

Other areas deserve immediate attention, promise relatively immediate returns, and fall directly within the existing mandate of the WTO. These include implementation of the Uruguay Round agreements, further integration of developing countries into the system, monitoring of members' trade policy regimes, the forthcoming agriculture negotiations, and sectoral liberalization within the general agreement on trade in services.

These items will be discussed but Francois and McDonald believe that there are other systematic issues that may not be on the agenda but should be. One of these is the spread of contingent protection regimes. Another is the method of negotiation in future rounds: formula tariff cuts, for example, merit reconsideration as the departure from this approach in the Uruguay Round led to tortuous, line by line negotiations.

Such an approach would also address the concerns of developing countries about peak tariffs (relatively high protection in sensitive areas, like textiles and clothing, that are important to developing countries) and tariff escalation (higher tariffs for processed commodities than for unprocessed ones).

In addition, the relative merits of broad versus sectoral negotiations should be examined. Experience with services negotiations since the Uruguay Round suggests that sectoral negotiations, at least in a WTO context, tend to make more progress when packaged with other negotiations. Future agricultural negotiations, if combined with planned talks on trade in services and calls for further industrial tariff liberalization, could offer a better opportunity for progress in these areas than if they are all handled separately.

This article reviews research reported in 'The Multilateral Trade Agenda: Uruguay Round Implementation and beyond', CEPR Discussion Paper No. 1533 (December 1996), by Joseph F Francois and Bradley McDonald. Francois is at Erasmus University in Rotterdam and a Research Fellow in CEPR's International Trade programme; McDonald is at the World Trade Organization.