World Trade Organization

World Trade Organization

The World Trade Organization (WTO), is an international organization designed to supervise and liberalize international trade. The WTO came into being on January 1, 1995, and is the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which was created in 1947, and continued to operate for almost five decades as a de facto international organization.

The World Trade Organization deals with the rules of trade between nations at a near-global level; it is responsible for negotiating and implementing new trade agreements, and is in charge of policing member countries' adherence to all the WTO agreements, signed by the bulk of the world's trading nations and ratified in their parliaments. Most of the WTO's current work comes from the 1986-94 negotiations called the Uruguay Round, and earlier negotiations under the GATT. The organization is currently the host to new negotiations, under the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) launched in 2001.

The WTO is governed by a Ministerial Conference, which meets every two years; a General Council, which implements the conference's policy decisions and is responsible for day-to-day administration; and a director-general, who is appointed by the Ministerial Conference. The WTO's headquarters are in Geneva, Switzerland.

The WTO's predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), was established after World War II in the wake of other new multilateral institutions dedicated to international economic cooperation - notably the Bretton Woods institutions now known as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Although an agreement covering trade was not negotiated at Bretton Woods, the Conference did recognize the need for a comparab...

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...new rule-making, underpinned by commitments to strengthen substantially assistance to developing countries.

The talks have been highly contentious and agreement has not been reached, despite the intense negotiations at Fifth Ministerial Conference in Cancún in 2003 and at the Sixth Ministerial Conference in Hong Kong on December 13 - 18, 2005. On July 24, 2006, at the end of yet another futile gathering of trade ministers in Geneva, Pascal Lamy, the WTO's Director-General, formally suspended the negotiations. Nevertheless, in his report to the WTO General Council on February 7, 2007, Lamy said that "political conditions are now more favorable for the conclusion of the Round than they have been for a long time". He then added that "political leaders around the world clearly want us to get fully back to business, although we in turn need their continuing commitment".