Summary of Participants' Remarks and Recommendations at a World Bank-GTZ sponsored Conference titled "Accession to the WTO: Country Experiences and Technical Assistance

Conference Summary - This summary is organised in the same manner as the sessions of the workshop. The first day of the workshop was devoted to a discussion of four developing countries' experiences with the WTO accession process and to an open panel discussion on the relative merits of potential reforms to the WTO accession process so as to make it more development friendly. The second day of the workshop was dominated by discussions in working groups and in the plenary sessions that followed them. The working groups first assessed the current trade-related technical assistance/trade-related capacity building (TRTA/TRCB) support provided by donor organisations and then made recommendations to improve upon existing TRTA/TRCB support. The two days of discussion by invited participants was followed by a public event on 19 November 2004. On that day a short discussion followed two presentations (summarising the findings of the prior two days and existing research on WTO accession) and a number of interventions from a panel.