Technical assistance is a joke. To be more precise, technical assistance is the butt of jokes, most of which feature a naïve do-gooder or a rapacious private company. Did you hear the one about the Americans in Mongolia? Sent out to advise the government on building free markets, they were heartened when officials asked for several hardcopies of the voluminous U.S. securities laws-photocopied on only one side of the page. It turns out the Mongolians were not true converts to the U.S. system; they merely wanted to use the documents for scrap to alleviate the government's chronic paper shortage. If that does not leave you breathless, perhaps you will find the one about the private sector advisor in Kazakhstan more amusing. When a local Kazakhstani bureaucrat fancied his red swim trunks, the advisor was forced to strip down and hand them over because angering the bureaucrat might jeopardize his chance of returning to the bottomless well of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) renewal contracts.
Sadly, these stories are not apocryphal. A few years ago, I managed a U.S. government-run technical assistance program targeted at North and West Africa, and I have at least a few such stories of my own. At times, I felt my fancy law degree and stints at a prestigious law firm and the nation's preeminent *123 trade policy agency had led me to a job as a glorified travel agent. Some of the foreign officials we flew to the United States for seminars I spent weeks organizing appeared more concerned with shopping trips to New York.
Thus, the anecdotal evidence would seem to support the intuitive belief of most Americans (and many beneficiary countries) that technical assistance is a joke. But for every example of waste and graft, there are equal numbers of success stories. “Success” in the technical assistance sense of the word is measured in incremental improvements-it would be naïve in the extreme to believe the typical one- to three-year assistance contract could cure all the problems facing a developing country. For me, success was measured project-by-project, and even individual-by-individual. If I convened a drafting session with some of the best U.S. and African legal minds to produce a model law on arbitration for West Africa, or if I helped draft Cape Verde's foreign trade memorandum-the first substantive step in the World Trade Organization (WTO) accession process-in record time and within budget, I considered that a success. Similarly, if I provided detailed first-rate training to an Algerian lawyer who could then go back to the legal affairs ministry and guide her country's effort to join the WTO, I felt justifiably proud.
In the Anecdote Wars, then, there are at least two sides (admittedly, the successes are not nearly as funny as stories of naked assistance providers). But anecdotes aside, significant problems plague technical assistance programs, both in their structure and in their implementation on the ground. Problems range from the familiar bugaboos of ethnocentrism and biased assistance that merely seek to replicate in developing countries what has worked in the West (or what would be in the West's best interest), to difficulties within the developing countries themselves in identifying their needs and absorbing the assistance provided. As some developing countries have candidly admitted, “they need technical assistance to identify their domestic technical assistance needs.”
The Doha Development Round was launched specifically to address some of these problems just as developing countries' frustration with the rules of *124 the trading system had reached its peak. Six years after the close of the Uruguay Round negotiations, which ushered in the greatest changes to the trading system since its inception in 1947, poor countries still found themselves on the outside looking in as the globalization phenomenon brought untold wealth to already-rich countries. Technical assistance was to be the catalyst propelling developing countries from outsider to full-fledged beneficiary of the globalization revolution, while at the same time compensating them for taking on a plethora of new rules that proved expensive to implement. To date, technical assistance has not achieved those objectives. Why?
This Article explores some of the reasons for that failure, focusing on the challenges facing both developing countries and the WTO in its effort to provide effective technical assistance. These challenges are significant, and merely throwing money at them-increasing “aid for trade”-without addressing some of the structural impediments to meaningful technical assistance will not be enough.
Trade and Aid: An Uneasy Alliance
The effort to assist countries in achieving sustained economic growth has had a long, and somewhat tattered, history. After World War II, the United States expended massive amounts of money and technical know-how in the reconstruction of Europe and Japan. But the current technical assistance model finds its roots not in the post-war era but in the Law and Development (“L&D”) movement of the 1960s. The underlying premise of the movement was that law was an indispensable prerequisite to economic development. If developing countries had not as yet constructed a system of laws capable of steering them out of poverty and into the modern economy, then such a system would be imported for them from America. During this period, a legion of American-trained lawyers fanned out into the developing world ready to build the legal infrastructure for development.
Despite the fashions of the time, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and subsequently the WTO, resisted the call to join the ranks of assistance providers. Even as a record number of developing countries acceded to the GATT in the 1970s, and despite the adoption of GATT Part IV-which acknowledged “the basic objectives of this Agreement include the raising of standards of living and the progressive development of the economies of all [Members]” - the organization defined its core mandate as trade liberalization and maintained that assistance activities were not within its competence. But that was all to change with the ending of the Uruguay Round trade negotiations in 1994.
The Uruguay Round ushered in a paradigm shift. Under the GATT's ala-carte approach, Members could pick and choose the rules that would apply to them. [FN14] Essentially, GATT created a “two-speed” system where rich countries liberalized more of their trade and took on more regulatory commitments than did developing countries. In the Uruguay Round, developing countries changed course and signed on to a “single-undertaking,” obligating them to implement all *126 WTO rules. [FN15] Having committed to a multitude of complex new rules, poorer countries found themselves unable to cope with the demands of implementation.
The “Implementation Problem,” as it came to be known, galvanized the WTO to action as developing countries demanded more and better technical assistance to meet their commitments. In the early days of providing such assistance, the WTO's efforts were less than spectacular, even by its own admission. The organization faced the same problems that other assistance providers had confronted: lack of donor funding, or ear-marked funding, that lacked flexibility; lack of coherence among the aid agencies resulting in duplication of effort; and lack of an overall design-plan for the provision of assistance that incorporated input from recipient or beneficiary countries. In short, the WTO found itself with too few resources responding to one-off requests for technical assistance from developing countries without sufficient coordination with other technical assistance networks. The organization was truly outside its area of competence.
In response to its failure, the WTO adopted The New Strategy for WTO Technical Cooperation for Capacity Building, Growth and Integration (“New Strategy”). The New Strategy called for a revamp of the WTO's assistance model to provide “a more focused response ... within a coherent trade policy framework.” [FN17] One-off training opportunities were disfavored; the organization committed itself to providing technical assistance that was part of a broader *127 integrated national plan linking WTO implementation obligations with development plans and poverty reduction strategies. [FN18]
The WTO's new approach to technical assistance represents a sea change that the organization is “still digesting.” [FN19] Despite the changes, the New Strategy fails to address some significant structural impediments to the provision of effective technical assistance. Perhaps the greatest impediment is the organization's continued uneasiness with the idea that development and technical assistance are part of its “core function.” The first sentence of the New Strategy reiterates that “the core mandate of the WTO is trade liberalization.” [FN20] Implicitly then, development and technical assistance are ancillary activities; to the extent it continues to be viewed as peripheral to the organization's “core mandate,” technical assistance activities will continue to be seen as not much more than a boon-an almsgiving venture-developed countries bestow on their poorer colleagues.
There have been a number of excellent proposals for improving the WTO's technical assistance programs, including suggestions for working more closely with agencies like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as well as regional development banks; creating a semi-autonomous agency that could provide bias-free advice; and opening a “branch-office” of sorts in Africa given the significant focus on technical assistance work on the continent. [FN25] Before any of these reforms can have a significant impact, however, the WTO must deal with the core of fear and distrust many beneficiary countries feel towards the organization and its assistance work. One African representative characterized WTO assistance as “ideological,” contending “[t]hey come to tell us what to think, what our positions should be.” [FN26] The WTO has responded, in part, by hiring more staff from developing countries, and by partnering with universities and respected institutions in the developing world, like the African Development Bank and the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa. [FN27]
More needs to be done to address the underlying distrust of WTO assistance activities. One suggestion I would make is to increase the opportunities for South-South technical assistance projects-perhaps funded by the WTO. Countries like India, Brazil, and now China, have a wealth of knowledge that can be shared, and they do not come with the same amount of “baggage” that WTO secretariat officials bring with them to the developing world.
Another suggestion-more in the form of an exhortation-is for the WTO to fully align its assistance activities with the development agendas of the beneficiary countries.
Conclusion
There is hope of integrating developing countries into the global trading system. But the coming end of the Doha Development Round [FN32] must bring with it more than hope if “developing countries, and especially the least-developed amongst them, [are to] secure a share in the growth in international trade commensurate with the needs of their economic development.” [FN33] Despite some of the problems identified in this Article, technical assistance is an important tool to propel developing countries into the global economy. It must be acknowledged, however, that such programs can play only a supporting role-albeit a significant one-in that process. Ultimately, it is for developing countries themselves to draft and implement coherent development agendas that are in line with their interests; technical assistance should be used to advance those needs rather than to promote the interests of the West.
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