The Doha Round of the World Trade Organization was named the Development Agenda, but showed clear divergences of interests among developing countries. The slow progress of the negotiations, the breakdown at Cancún, and the uneasy compromise reached in July 2004 confirmed that different parts of the agenda and different groups of countries needed to be investigated in order to determine who benefits. Even where trade reforms unambiguously aimed to improve total world welfare, the distribution among countries could have left some losers, and even in countries that gain, some may lose.

The following papers summarise assessments of the principal issues of the WTO round, how the outcome might affect poverty, the progress of the negotiations, and the impact on four very different countries.