World Trade Organization Ministerial Declarations: Singapore vs. Doha

Ministerial Conferences are meetings of the WTO highest decision-making body held every two years.

The Singapore Ministerial Conference of 1996 was the inaugural meeting of the WTO after its foundation in 1995 through the Uruguay Round of negotiations. The WTO came to be formed by conserving structures from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

The Doha Development Round was launched in 2001 during the fourth ministerial conference held in Doha, Qatar. As it names states, it aimed at addressing more directly developing countries’ needs, neglected in previous WTO rounds and historically in the GATT. Even as there is a high usage of ‘development’ words in the Singapore Ministerial Declaration, notice how some cases use these words literally as opposed to referring to economic or social development. This is not the case in the Doha declaration where most if not all cases refer to its progressive meaning.

winknpl packages are used to compare the usage of 'development' and 'liberalization' words in two Ministerial Declarations. The size of the word corresponds to the number of times it is being used in the text. For exact numbers please scroll to the bottom of the page.

The model considers as a unit the root word in a Part of Speech (POS). For example, "developing" and "develop" are a single word if the model considers them both verbs or adjectives. Several uses of develop exist given its different interpretation as a verb, noun, or adjective.