The US took its appeal for a new round of market opening talks to the Swiss Alps at the weekend, almost two months after world trade negotiations in Seattle collapsed.
Top US officials, led by President Clinton, converged on Davos and the World Economic Forum's annual meeting to drive home this belief.
The alternative, they warned, was to let the world slip back into dangerous protectionism. "The trade agenda must move forward," US Trade Representative Ms Charlene Barshefsky said.
Treasury Secretary Mr Larry Summers said the US would not let up in its efforts to seek a more integrated world, pressing for more free capital flows, structural reforms in developing nations and support for the world's poorest.
US calls for more stringent labour and environmental standards for global trade have angered developing countries, which fear their exports will become more costly, putting them at a competitive disadvantage.
The Clinton administration has said developing nations should seek to avoid the mistakes today's developed countries made on their own paths to industrialisation.
"Globally, our agenda today must be to make the case for imports in all our countries," Mr Summers said. "And it must be to recognise that in an integrated world, trade cannot be divorced from other concerns."
Ms Barshefsky said developing countries could no longer afford to brush off concerns about issues such as labour and the environment in the US and Europe, which together provided the market for some 40 per cent of all goods produced in the world.
But US officials acknowledged the two sides remained far apart. "The developing world is not hearing what we're saying and we're not hearing what the developing world is saying," Ms Barshefsky said. "We're passing like ships in the night."
