Role of the World Trade Organization in Multilateral International Trade: An Evaluation.

889 Words2 Pages

Introduction
Until the end of twenty century, multilateral international trade was functioning without an international organization that coordinate between countries. Some people might justify the role of General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in multilateral trade since the GATT has been providing the rules for the international trading system before the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO). However, GATT was only a set of rules set by its trading nations with no institutional foundation, and it did not have the same international influence as other international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the World Bank (Krueger & Aturupane 1998, p. 1).

Eventually, it all changed in 1994, for the purpose of strengthening the international trading system, the GATT was replaced by the WTO after seven years effort on the Uruguay Round of trading negotiation. As the establishment of the WTO, for the first time, international trading system runs under a solid international organization with a fully legal characteristic (eds Rugman & Boyd 2001). The WTO today is based in Geneva, Switzerland. It consists of 159 member countries with twenty-four countries are the current candidates and eighty percent of current members are developing countries (WTO 2013).

This paper argues that the WTO plays a key role as an international organization on the development of multilateral international trade in terms of laying a foundation of a fair and free world trade system and creating a considerably stable external environment. However, at the same time, there are also several challenges are waiting to be addressed by the organization.

Promote peace and handle disputes
The trading system of the WTO ...

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...oad_e/10b_e.pdf.

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WTO 2001, Trading into the Future, Organization report, viewed 21 May 2014, retrieved from http://www.wto.org.

Rugman, A & Boyd, G (eds) 2001, The World Trade Organization in the New Global Economy, Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, UK.

Jawara, F & Kwa, A 2003, Behind the scenes at the WTO: the real world of international trade negotiations, Zed Books, London, UK.

Sampson, G (ed.) 2001, The role of the World Trade Organization in global governance, United Nations University Press, Tokyo, Japan.

Charnovitz, S 1999, Addressing Environmental and Labor Issues in the World Trade Organization, Democratic Leadership Council, viewed 22 May 2014, http://www.dlc.org/ndol_cid308.html?kaid=108&subid=128&contentid=649.

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