From the Article:
Like a high-end high school reunion, the annual gathering is partly about the formal event but equally about the door knocking, policy panels, think-tank speeches and bilateral lobbying that take place. President Obama missed a similar gathering last week in Indonesia, possibly setting back U.S. trade discussions there; U.S. officials also canceled trade talks scheduled for this week in Europe.
The impact of absence is impossible to calculate — meetings can always be rescheduled and the outcome quite probably can turn out the same.
But “it may mean fewer meetings on the agenda, or fewer issues pursued in these meetings. Either way, the shutdown comes at a cost to the U.S. agenda,” Scott Morris, a former Treasury official who served as a liaison to the World Bank, wrote in a recent essay for the Center for Global Development.
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