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However, this kind of judgment cannot be so readily made in regard to the outcome of the
Uruguay Round negotiations affecting trade relations between the developed and developing countries.
There was neither the same symmetry in the different trade measures on which the trade partners made
concessions, nor could it be assumed that the supply responses to the reductions in similar measures
would be roughly comparable. The most dramatic gain for the developing countries was purportedly the
agreement gradually to dismantle the Multi-Fiber Arrangement (MFA). In return, these countries
undertook to lower or bind their tariffs, remove quotas, open up their service industries to some degree,
and abide by new or revised rules for such matters as subsidies, foreign direct investment (FDI), and
intellectual property. In some of these areas of negotiation, such as the service industries or the new or
revised trade rules, the gains in market access clearly favored the developed countries. Were these offset
by a possible excess of gains accruing to the developing countries that arose from the mutual reduction or
removal of tariffs and quotas by all countries? It is evidently extremely difficult to form a judgment and
all the more difficult if we add in both the financial transfers implied by the agreement on intellectual
property rights — though not a market-access issue at all — and the back-loading of the removal of the
MFA quotas. Thus, with regard to the relations between developed and developing countries as reflected
in the Uruguay Round outcomes, the criterion of equivalence in market access gains seems to recede into
a fog of uncertainty.

Does this mean then that the criterion is useless? This does not appear to be so. In the earlier
stages of multilateral trade negotiations, at least in relations among themselves, the developed countries
have in the past adopted common formulae for tariff reductions and agreed on the inclusion or exclusion
of other negotiable items on the basis of expected reciprocal benefits. It is when negotiations advanced to
more concrete and specific levels that the attention of negotiators appears to have shifted from the issue of
inter-country equivalence to an internal accounting of the political value or cost of the concessions gained
and granted. At that point, there is no particular reason to expect any correspondence between the inter-
country equivalence implied in the initial framework for negotiations and the political balance sheet
drawn up at home. Even so, Finger, Reincke and Castro (2002) found that in the final stages of

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