World trade may expand even as WTO talks sputter

The collapse of global trade talks for the third time in as many years may be only a bump in the road for world commerce, which continued to expand while negotiations sputtered.

Global markets shrugged off the announcement that trade ministers at the World Trade Organization in Geneva failed after nine days of talks to agree on a plan to cut agriculture subsidies. The sticking point was a difference between the US and India over how poor nations could opt out of tariff cuts when encountering a surge of imports.

While negotiators and some experts depicted the collapse as a setback for the global economy, others said the decades already spent lowering trade barriers, combined with technological innovations and an explosion of bilateral agreements, suggest such predictions may be overstated.