Winners of the Best New Tourist Attraction award, the company were recognised for their contribution to tourism in the Southeast Asian region with their ‘Wonder Full’ Light and Water Spectacular, produced for the Marina Bay Sands Integrated Resort in Singapore. Laservision’s creation was selected for its creativity in design, functionality, harmony with the environment, and the overall quality experienced by audiences. “Laservision has a long and enviable track record of producing number one night time tourist attractions around the globe,” said Shannon Brooks, director of projects and marketing at Laservision. “From Singapore’s ‘Wonder Full’ Light and Water Spectacular to Hong Kong’s  ‘Symphony of Lights’; the holder of the Guinness World Record for the Largest Light & and Sound Show in the world. The recognition by ASEANTA of this success brings credibility to companies like Laservision who are at the forefront of the entertainment, attractions and tourism industry.”

Guests at the ceremony included the secretary general of the United Nations World Trade Organisation, Mr Taleb Rafai, who stated in his opening address: “With over 75 million tourists visiting the ASEAN region last year, generating 1.2 trillion dollars in tourism revenue, the ASEAN nations form a significant part of the world’s tourism industry.”

The WTO Annual Report by the Trade Policy Review Body shows global activity is down and economic performance is uneven between countries as debt levels, financial volatility and high unemployment persist, deteriorating confidence.

These risks, along with falling confidence have been magnified by the perception that government’s responses to economic challenges have so far been inadequate.

World trade growth has been slower than expected in recent months. A range of problems have hit developed economies including natural disasters, national budget issues, credit conditions and the sovereign debt crisis.

Developing countries have also been hit hard by global circumstances with signs of overheating in some of the more major markets.

In light of the deteriorating conditions the forecast for world export growth in 2011 was 5.8 percent, revised from an earlier estimate of 6.5 percent. Developed economies exports however are expected to rise by 3.7 percent, with those from developing countries expected to rise by 8.5 percent.

The economic recovery has not been strong enough to boost employment growth with employment not expected to return to its 2008 levels in high income economies until 2015.

TPRB reviews show an increase in the imposition of new trade restrictions this year, with 53 percent more restrictive measures recorded than in the previous period, although governments have largely continued to resist protectionist pressures.

Actions to shield domestic industries are adding to the downside risks for the global economy. Some sectors most affected by new restrictive trade measures are base metal and products, machinery and mechanical appliances, organic chemicals and meat products.

New restrictive measures introduced between mid-October 2010 and 2011 however, cover around 0.9 percent of world imports, down from 1.2 percent recorded in the previous period. Some countries have adopted measures  to facilitate trade by reducing or temporarily exempting import tariffs and streamlining customs procedures.

Regional Trade Agreements continue to be strong with 390 RTAs notified to the WTO as of the end of October 2011, with 211 of those in force.

“This is an exciting development for Russia, Australia and the global trading system,” said Australian Trade Minister Craig Emerson.

The agreement has been welcomed by Australia and means the world’s 11th largest economy will soon join the other 153 members of the WTO.

“Membership of the WTO is a commitment to play by a set of rules designed to make trade free and fair for all Members,” said Emerson. “The WTO is a club countries want to join and no-one has ever left it.”

The accession of Russia into the WTO will guarantee improved market access for Australian exporters of agriculture, manufacturing and services, with Russia agreeing to lower some import tariffs as soon as their WTO membership becomes effective.

The announcement of Russia’s accession comes after the proposal of a new pathway for the Doha Round by Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard. The new pathway was proposed at the recent G20 Leaders’ Meeting in Cannes.

Gillard and Emerson will seek further endorsement at APEC meetings in Honolulu this week.

But Emerson said the bill is anti-trade. “All of Mr Abbott’s instincts are interventionist and protectionist,” he said. “We will not negotiate with Mr Abbott on the palm oil bill… Mr Abbott is feigning concern for Australian manufacturing, but he wants to load up food processing companies with a $150 million cost burden and risk a trade war with Malaysia and Indonesia.”

Both the South-East Asian nations have warned they will take action at the World Trade Organisation if the bill passes.

The bill, first introduced in 2009, calls for any products containing palm oil to be labelled. Palm oil is present in over 40 percent of all packaged foods in Australia, but is usually identified as vegetable oil. The Greens, Coalition and independent Senator Nick Xenophon have sponsored the bill hoping to empower consumers to make their own choices when it comes to purchasing palm oil.

Palm oil is harvested from oil palm plantations. In South East Asia, millions of hectares of native rainforest have been cleared to make way for the profitable crop, destroying the natural habitat of many endangered species including orang-utans. When Xenophon introduced the bill, he said it is estimated an area equivalent to 300 soccer fields of forest is cut down each hour for oil palm plantations, resulting in the deaths of more than 1000 Orang-utans a year.

But Emerson says the bill is just another example of Abbott’s protectionism. “Mr Abbott’s personal support for yet another anti-trade, anti-business bill shows how reckless he is on economic and trade policy.”

“Intra-regional trade accounts probably for as much as 50-to-60 percent of the region’s total imports and exports,” Lamy said.

“[Asia-Pacific trade] will increase further, not least because of the systems for trade integration in the region,” he predicted. “You have ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations); APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Co-Operation forum) and Trans-Pacific Partnership.”

The lead has shifted from historical frontrunner the European Union. Lamy said intra-regional trade accounts for around 40 percent of North America’s trade, 25 percent of South America’s and approximately 10 percent of Africa’s.

The announcement came on the back of the WTO’s recent publication of a study on regional and bilateral free-trade agreements. The study concluded that such agreements met the need to regulate global production, but also that the WTO’s multilateral system played a similar role in reducing complexity.

“If I were a multinational company, what really matters to me is to have convergence,” Lamy explained. “My objective would be to have as much as possible the same rules everywhere so that I can benefit from economy of scale.”

The European Commission Director General for Trade Jean-Luc Demarty said that not all options and avenues for market access had been explored. “That is why we felt we should formulate ideas to stimulate further engagement. Gaps can close if the political will is there.”

The talks have stalled over conflict between developing and developed nations over market access and trade tariffs. China, India and Brazil all have developing country exemptions for market restrictions, which the US believes are no longer fair as these nations have huge export economies.

The EU’s plan aims to keep everyone happy by tailoring tariffs to different products, focusing on high tariffs for industrial goods including chemicals, machinery and electronics and zero tariffs in other areas.

US ambassador Michael Punke said the US was open to the idea. “We can’t know what the outcomes might be but we can certainly know very quickly whether or not it can catalyse negotiations.”

However, Punke noted the plan only dealt with industrial tariffs and didn’t propose a solution for conflict over agricultural tariffs. Nations dependent on agricultural exports including Australia want greater access to markets in the US and Europe, which are currently heavily subsidised to protect local industry.

There is hope the plan will reinvigorate the Doha round, which is flagging in spite of a self-imposed completion deadline of November 2011. However, many delegates hold little hope as months of US-China bilateral trade talks have gained little ground. The Chinese ambassador Yi Xiaozhun has criticised the mercantilism approach to the talks, saying the WTO member nations had lost sight of the idealist aim. “Negotiations seem to be diverting away from the development mandate and towards market access.”

WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy said the implications of failure would be serious. “Failure of the WTO to harness our growing economic interdependence in a cooperative manner risks a slow, silent weakening of the multilateral trading system in the longer term. With this, a loss of interest by political leaders in many quarters, an erosion of the rules-based multilateral trading system and a creeping return to the law of the jungle.”

“Our sense is there is not a lot of movement and there’s not much time—in fact, very little time—to go before we won’t be able to hit the 2011 deadline,” he said in an interview with ABC News on 20 March. The G20 Seoul Summit in 2010 set a deadline of November 2011 to conclude the decade-long World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations.

Emerson believes participating countries have been too focused on the costs of trade liberalisation. The current round of trade liberalisation talks began in Doha, Qatar in 2001 and has stalled repeatedly over conflict between developed and developing nations.

Developed economies led by the United States, the European Union and Japan are insisting emerging economies open up their markets, while developing nations including Brazil, China, India and South Africa are demanding a reduction on domestic agricultural subsidies in developed countries.

Emerson is concerned this should not become an insurmountable obstacle to reaching agreement. “All right, have a discussion about the price for success. But there should be a real discussion about the price of failure. The price of failure would mean a deterioration in our international trading rules.”

In a speech to the US Chamber of Commerce, Gillard told businessmen that the World Trade Organisation talks were extremely important. “The round simply must conclude this year. 2011 is our last and best hope to get this done.”

The Doha round stalled in November last year over unresolvable conflicts between agricultural exporters. Australia led a bloc of low-subsidy producers to push for the US and European Union to reconsider their generous farm subsidies, which place low-subsidy exporters at a disadvantage. But powerful farmers’ unions in the US and Europe lobbied against liberalisation. India and China were also immovable on the significant import duties they impose on farm products.

Gillard also used her meetings with Obama to discuss the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, a developing free trade pact between nine countries along the Pacific rim.“The Trans-Pacific Partnership is another key economic opportunity. President Obama and I are committed to achieving a next generation trade and investment agreement,” Gillard said.

She said the agreement would provide a platform to liberalise trade across the region. “Indeed the Partnership could ultimately provide a pathway to a Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific region.”

The UNWTO recorded 642 million arrivals worldwide, around 40 million more than the same period last year, representing overall growth of 7 percent, and predicts figures for 2010 will top previous records.

Emerging destinations led the surge, with Asia and the Pacific first to rebound from the 2009 crisis and Europe and the Americas recovering more slowly.

Growth was also strong in the Middle East at 16 percent and Africa, the only region to post growth in tourism in 2009, at 9 percent, boosted by publicity generated by the FIFA World Football Cup held in South Africa in July.

The impact of the ash cloud from the Icelandic volcano limited overall growth in international arrivals to just 2 percent for April, and recovery in Europe remains at less than 5 percent in most regions.

In the Americas South America is on a par with the world average at 7 percent and North America at 9 percent, but the Caribbean recorded just 3 percent.

UNWTO Secretary-General Taleb Rfai said governments worldwide should increase their focus on tourism in recognition of the sector’s contribution to economic recovery, employment and development.

Factors threatening recovery include budget constraints to balance public deficits and unemployment, which the International Labour Organization warned may continue to 2015. UNWTO’s statistics point to tourism as a key sector since it generates more jobs faster than other industries.

“In spite of tourism’s proven contribution to the economy there has been an increased temptation to introduce and increase taxation on travel, particularly on air transport, Rfai said. “These impediments seriously affect our capacity to generate jobs and stimulate economic growth through export earnings.”

Doha, capital city of emerging emirate Qatar in the Middle East, was the site of the 2001 World Trade Organisation (WTO) Ministerial Conference, a meeting held biennially by the topmost body of the organisation.

The theme of the meeting focused on ensuring developing countries benefited from the multilateral trading system that the WTO provided, hence its alternative name ‘the Development Round’.

From the conference came the Ministerial Declaration that to tackle the global economic slowdown of the late 1990s/early 2000s, the WTO and its members would need to “maintain the process of reform and liberalisation of trade policies, thus ensuring that the system plays its full part in promoting recovery, growth and development” and to “reject the use of protectionism”.

The Doha Round in brief

In particular the Doha Development Round, or Doha Round as it is more popularly known, recognised the role that trade plays in the economic development of emerging countries and the alleviation of poverty.
In essence, the Doha Round is therefore a negotiating platform for a free trade agreement encompassing all the members of the WTO, but one especially mindful of the disadvantages in the trading system experienced by less developed countries that may not have the power, influence or leverage of their more affluent counterparts.

As a result, the work program developed at Doha reflected the special needs of struggling, underdeveloped economies participating in liberal trade.

The declaration set this out in no uncertain terms—”we recognise the need for all our peoples to benefit from the increased opportunities and welfare gains that the multilateral trading system generates”—and the ministers pledged to “continue to make positive efforts designed to ensure that developing countries, and especially the least developed among them, secure a share in the growth of world trade commensurate with the needs of their economic development”.

To meet these goals, they noted that “enhanced market access, balanced rules, and well targeted, sustainably financed technical assistance and capacity-building programs have important roles to play”.

The Doha Round also ties in with the United Nations Millennium Development Goals to: end poverty and hunger, provide universal education, achieve gender equality, improve maternal and infant health, combat HIV/AIDS, achieve environmental sustainability and strengthen global partnerships.

In light of this, WTO director-general Pascal Lamy noted that “the strengthening of the multilateral trading system through the conclusion of the Doha Round and Aid for Trade are the contributions that the WTO has to make” to meet the goals.

Advance Australia

According to a conservative estimate by the WTO, a Doha Round deal would lift the global economy by $130 billion a year, a gain based on cutting proposed tariffs.

However, a study by the Peterson Institute for International Economics in the USA shows that a trade deal could boost the world economy by between $300–700 billion a year, spread equitably across developed and developing countries.

This figure includes the broader impact of a trade deal such as efficiency gains made by helping developing countries improve trade infrastructure and ease bureaucracy.

Australia has much to gain from a worldwide trade deal of this nature, as it would level the playing field in favour of more open trading terms. “This is the pinnacle in terms of trade policy negotiation, in terms of making a fairer environment for global trade,” says Cameron MacMillan, former trade commissioner and current executive director of International Business at global business advisory BDO in Queensland.”

For Australia, being a very open trading environment, this would just be marvellous to lock in.”