There is general agreement about the repeated failures of WTO summits since
the 1999 Seattle meeting. The possible temptations of a return from multilateral
trade agreements to bilateral trade may be a big threat to world development.
In any event, the demographic forecasts for the current century, as shown in
Figure 8, point to a slowdown in growth and to UDCs entering more frequently
into demographic transitions (Livi-Bacci, 1989), which will probably translate into
an improvement in the economic growth (Bloom et al., 1999).