It’s rare that you have to convince a business to defend its interests. But Fredrik Erixon and Andreas Freytag try to coax exporters to care about the Doha Round in The Wall Street Journal Europe:

The World Trade Organization has often been portrayed by antitrade groups as a corporate puppet. But one key problem in this round has been the relative silence on industry’s part. Business has been the dog that didn’t bark…

Business leaders’ absence from the game is understandable. All the global-governance hubris, windy rhetoric and political grandstanding invariably displayed at big WTO meetings offer ample reasons for outsiders to take a rain check…

Yet the Doha agenda still has serious appeal for businesses interested in freer trade. Business opportunities in goods and industrial products will be significantly improved, particularly when it comes to exports to major developing countries. And binding countries to their currently applied tariffs — which are lower than the ones agreed in the last multilateral talks, the Uruguay Round — can increase stability and certainty in world trade. The Doha Round will not substantially liberalize trade in services, but it can lock in already achieved liberalizations, especially for investment, as well as dismantle some of the worst nontariff barriers to trade. What’s more, the vast majority of the business community has a lot to gain from a WTO deal that puts limits on antidumping measures, today the weapon of choice for protectionist governments, and prohibits egregious abuses of other trade-defense instruments.

So why aren’t businesses interested in the Doha round? Perhaps it’s the focus on agriculture and development that has turned them off. Maybe the lack of services liberalization is problematic. Or have businesses already obtained the trade liberalization most important to them, as Anne Krueger suggests?

It is not often asserted that the existence of preferential arrangements is a reason for failure to support, or opposition to, further multilateral liberalization. But the fact is that producers already exporting to PTA markets are either efficient and have already achieved the benefits (to them) of trade liberalization or they are inefficient and do not want multilateral competition. Either way, support for further multilateral liberalization has eroded. Many in the policy community have noted the absence of strong support from the US business community for the Doha Round, as compared to support for the earlier rounds of trade negotiations. It is not possible to prove that the absence of support for Doha is the result of PTAs (or the prospect of further PTAs) but it is certainly possible and even, I would argue, likely.

Erixon and Freytag aren’t much interested in that hypothesis, however:

One can argue at length over bilateralism versus multilateralism, but this is a superficial exercise that only clouds the real issues. They are neither opposites nor substitutes for each other. There is room for both of them.

What other hypotheses might be offered to explain the absence of support from business lobbies?

Update: Meanwhile, the FT says: “US business leaders on Thursday threw their weight behind the Bush administration’s last-ditch drive to revive its trade agenda before the president’s fast-track trade promotion authority expires later this year.”