12 December 2008. The trade ministers of the G20 countries are expected to meet before the year is out in order to try to rescue the gridlocked Doha Round in the context of the WTO negotiations in Geneva.

In view of this summit, 17 internationally leading trade economists under the leadership of Prof. Simon J. Evenett of the University of St.Gallen (HSG) and Prof. Richard Baldwin from the Graduate Institute in Geneva are appealing to world leaders to fight the protectionist tendencies in the wake of the financial crisis.

This is urgently necessary since “this burgeoning protectionism is threatening a quarter of a century of progress in world trade,” says Evenett.

In order to shift the burden of the crisis on to trading partners to the highest possible extent, the trading powers of both the 1930s and the 1980s relied on the instrument of protectionism and thus on the walling-off of their own markets. These tendences can also be discerned in the current financial crisis.

This is what 17 internationally leading trade economists are now fighting against in the context of VoxEU.org in an e-book entitled What world leaders should do to halt the spread of protectionism and edited by Prof. Simon Evenett from the University of St.Gallen (HSG) and Prof. Richard Baldwin from the Graduate Institute in Geneva.

Protectionist policies are ill-advised in that the countries affected would sooner or later discover them and retaliate accordingly, says Evenett. “This could trigger a chain reaction which, particularly in the current situation, would have serious consequences.”