Wto and Gatt

Nowadays, the rising of international trade has made a significance impact on the society. Many countries in the world are now open their economy and start to trade with other countries to sustain their comparative advantage and to use their resources efficiently, the domestic consumers are now can enjoy a variety of products produced internationally, which may be cheaper in price but have a better quality than the domestics products. In the past, it was more difficult for the international trade to occurred as many countries at that time did not open their economy due to many reasons such as political issues, wars and the high level of trade barriers. The question is how does the trade liberalisation occurred and who is responsible to sustain the free trade and resolve the trading issues between each nations?.

After the second world war has ended in 1945. International trade has been liberalised dramatically as a result of multilateral trade negotiations govern by the General   Agreement on Tariffs and Trade or GATT (Ossa, 2011). The GATT was established in 1947 with headquarters in Geneva (Goldstein, Rivers & Tomz, 2007). It was negotiated during the UN Conference on Trade and Employment and was the outcome of the failure of negotiating governments to create the International Trade Organisation or ITO (Tucci & Tucker III, 1996). The GATT was aiming for the promotion of free trade through multilateral trade negotiations and eliminating the trade barriers (Hill, 2011; Sinha, 2005).

According to Ossa (2011), the WTO statistic shows that industrialised countries have cut their tariffs on industrial products by an average 36 percent during the first five GATT rounds (1947– 67) which was focused exclusively on tariff reductions. and the last three rounds with an average 37 percent in the Kennedy Round (1964–67), an average 33 percent in the Tokyo Round (1973–79), and an average 38 percent in the Uruguay Round (1986–94). Furthermore, another GATT’s... [continues]

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