Les pays arabes dans le Cycle de Doha : entre ambitions et réalités

Since 2001, the WTO has launched the Doha Round that aims to speed up the liberalization of trade policies while ensuring that developing countries, in particular the least developed among them, ensure a share in the growth of world trade that corresponds to the needs of their economic development. However, like many developing countries, the Arab countries have ambiguous relationships with the process of multilateral negotiations, ambiguity that characterizes more generally their position within the WTO. The Doha Round has shown the Arab countries? acceptation of the virtues of free trade and their desire for integrating the multilateral trading system. A the same time, the impact of the Arab countries on the conduct of the negotiation process remains low and reflects, ultimately, their marginalization, as a large number of developing countries, within the WTO system. This contribution attempts to analyze the substantial issues of the Doha Round for Arab countries and the reasons of this ambiguity.