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World Trade Organization Toolkit : The WTO
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)/WTO HistoryThe WTO came into existence in 1995 and is the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The GATT was signed in 1947 and entered into force in January 1948. The GATT is one of the multilateral economic initiatives taken after the Second World War to enhance the economic international cooperation. The "Bretton Woods" Agreement which was signed in 1944 considered the creation of three economic institutions: the International Trade Organisation (ITO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), also called the World Bank. The IMF and the IBRD were duly created in 1947. However, the ITO never came into existence. In 1946 and 1947, several meetings took place to negotiate the creation of the ITO. Negotiations focused on three main parts: one part dealt with the preparation of a charter for the ITO, the second part focused on negotiating a multilateral agreement to reciprocally reduce tariffs, and the third one on drafting the general principles and obligations relating to tariff reduction. The second and third parts constituted the GATT. The drafting of the GATT was terminated by October 1947. However, as the drafting of the ITO Charter was not completed at that time, the GATT entered into force on 1 January 1948 on a provisional basis. The entry into force of the GATT was made on the basis of the Protocol of Provisional Application ("PPA"). The drafting of the ITO Charter was completed in March 1948. However, it never entered into force since ratification proved to be impossible for some Members, specifically the United States since the US Congress rejected several times the ratification of the ITO Charter. The GATT remained applicable on the basis of the Protocol of Provisional Application for several decades. It was only in 1995 when the WTO came into existence that a real institution was created and that any reference to a provisional application was set aside. One striking feature of the GATT/WTO history is the successive rounds of negotiations which led to new schedules of tariff concessions and new commitments towards greater liberalisation. Since the creation of the GATT, some eight rounds have been successfully concluded. The first six rounds of negotiations concentrated exclusively on further reducing tariffs. These rounds include the Geneva Round (1947), the Annecy Round (1948), the Torquay Round (1950), the Geneva Round (1956), the Dillon Round (1960-1961) and the Kennedy Round (1964-1967). The seventh Round, i.e. the Tokyo Round (1973-1979) focused not only on further reducing the tariffs but also addressed various non-tariff barriers to trade. The result was the negotiation of a series of side agreements which either developed basic principles included in the GATT or new topics. One important feature of those agreements was that they were not multilateral. In other words, they were conditional, meaning that they were only binding for those countries which signed the concerned side agreement. Nine side agreements have been negotiated:
The eighth Round of negotiations, i.e. the Uruguay Round, was launched by a Declaration which included a very ambitious agenda. Besides negotiations for further tariff reductions, the agenda also included negotiations on new topics including services, intellectual property, agricultural goods, textile and clothing and investment measures. Two issues relating to institutional aspects were also addressed during the negotiations: the dispute-settlement rules and the "Future of the GATT System". The Uruguay Round is probably the most important Round in the history of the GATT/WTO, not only because it is the longest in time (1986-1993), but also because of its achievements. It is in the framework of the Uruguay Round that:
However, this is not the end of the story. At the Ministerial Conference in Doha, in November 2001, WTO Members decided to launch a new round of negotiations: the Doha Round. They also agreed to work on other issues, in particular the implementation of the present agreements. The entire package is called the Doha Development Agenda (DDA). The agenda launched by the Doha Ministerial Declaration for the new round of negotiations is very broad. Twenty-one subjects are listed in the Doha Declaration: implementation-related issues, agriculture, services, market-access for non-agricultural products, trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights, trade & investment, trade & competition policy, transparency in government procurement, trade facilitation, anti-dumping, subsidies, trade regional agreements, dispute settlement understanding, trade & environment, electronic commerce, small economies, trade, debt & finance, trade & technology transfer, technical cooperation & capacity building, least-developed countries, special & differential treatment. The Doha Declaration provides that all negotiations are to end by 1 January 2005. It also includes a series of deadlines which WTO Members should meet during the negotiating process. For example, the Declaration provides that modalities for the negotiations on agriculture should be agreed upon by 31 March 2003. One important feature of the current state of the negotiations is the failure to comply with a series of deadlines imposed by the Doha Declaration. These repeated failures demonstrate the difficulty for WTO Members to "build bridges" because of their conflicting positions. Under the Doha Declaration, the task of the Cancún Ministerial Meeting, which was the first Ministerial Meeting to take place after the Doha Ministerial Meeting (in September 2003), was to "take stock of progress in the DDA negotiations, provide any necessary political guidance and take decisions as necessary." Although Cancún saw delegations move closer to consensus on a number of key issues, members remained deeply divided over a number of issues, including the "Singapore" issues - launching negotiations on investment, competition policy, transparency in government procurement, and trade facilitation - and agriculture. The conference ended without a consensus. Instead, the ministers issued a six-paragraph ministerial statement calling for the General Council, meeting at senior officials' level, to act by 15 December 2003 so that the negotiations could end quickly and successfully. Learn more about the DDA and the new developments in the Doha negotiations: WTO website Office of the General Counsel
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