The advantage of these bilateral or regional agreements is that they promote greater trade between the contracting parties. They can also accelerate the liberalization of world trade when multilateral negotiations are in difficulty. Recalcitrant countries that are excluded from bilateral agreements and therefore do not participate in the enhancement of the resulting trade may then be led to join them and remove their own barriers to trade. Proponents of these agreements have called this process “competitive liberalization,” which challenges countries to remove trade barriers in order to keep pace with other countries. Thus, shortly after the implementation of NAFTA, the EU embarked on a free trade agreement with Mexico and finally signed it to ensure that European products do not suffer any competitive disadvantage in the Mexican market as a result of NAFTA. The fourth and fifth evolutions are perhaps best described as non-developments. At the end of the Uruguay Round, WTO member countries entered a new major round of multilateral negotiations, known as the Doha Round. These negotiations began in 2001, but they are at a standstill and, at this stage, it can be said with certainty that the Doha Round is virtually dead. Negotiations have mostly stumbled over divisions between developing and industrialised countries, but considerable conflicts have also erupted between the EU and the US over agricultural subsidies.
This lack of progress in multilateral trade liberalization is probably linked to the two developments mentioned above — the proliferation of regional trade agreements and the growing role of developing countries — but the underlying reasons for the failure of the Doha Round are an open question. At the 1994 meeting in Bogor, Indonesia, APEC leaders adopted the Bogor Goals, which aim for free and open trade and investment in the Asia-Pacific region by 2010 for developed countries and by 2020 for developing countries. In 1995, APEC established a business advisory board called the APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC), composed of three executives from each member economy. To achieve the Bogor Goals, APEC is working in three main areas: on the eve of the September 2007 round of negotiations on Economic Partnership Agreements with the EU, sixteen countries in the Common Market in Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) reject the EU`s attempt to remove trade barriers that will open African markets to EU products. Such a move would have devastating effects on African industrial capacity and customs revenues.