Getting business input to bolster trade negotiations

Dmitry Grouzobinski has brought out the importance of businesses and business inputs in trade negotiations in this piece. Often trade negotiations are conducted in a vacuum with minimal or no business inputs. In some cases, large influential and national champions do provide their inputs to ensure their interests are protected. It often transposes itself into negotiating positions. But what about smaller businesses? What about those who have no voice in large industrial bodies or associations. Developing country negotiators often have an issue of formulating a negotiating position because of a lack of information on what is in their country's national interest.

I was surprised to read about this problem existing for more well developed trading economies like Australia too. Dmitry opines:

A common myth is that trade negotiators begin each day with detailed marching orders from slick corporate lobbyists representing all the major multinationals. Frankly, that level of engagement would be a nice change.

The reality is that creating a pipeline of timely, candid and usable business input across the full spectrum of trade policy work has eluded governments.

Free trade agreement negotiations, being higher profile, are the easiest part of trade policy work on which to solicit business views, but results are still middling.

The Australia-UK FTA has, in half a year, received just 16 submissions. Other consultations did better, but even the 100 and 150 submissions received by EU and China negotiation consultations respectively can hardly be said to represent the sum total of potential views on such critical trading relationships.

Many a times countries negotiate complex trade agreements with a lack of understanding on how much impact those delas would have on their businesses. The quality of interaction with businesses when seeking inputs is sub-optimal and at times scarce. This has been a perennial problem with negotiation - and he makes the right point that both governments and businesses have to sit up and take stock.