Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The WTO has 153 members, representing more than 95% of total world trade
and 30 observers, most seeking membership. The WTO is governed by a ministerial
conference, meeting 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 stated goal is to improve the welfare of the peoples of its member
countries, specifically by lowering trade barriers and providing a platform for negotiation
of trade.
Its main mission is "to ensure that trade flows as smoothly, predictably and freely
as possible".
This main mission is further specified in certain core functions serving and
safeguarding five fundamental principles, which are the foundation of the multilateral
trading system.
FUNCTIONS
Among the various functions of the WTO, these are regarded by analysts as the
most important:
• It oversees the implementation, administration and operation of the covered
agreements.
• It provides a forum for negotiations and for settling disputes.
• Additionally, it is the WTO's duty to review the national trade policies, and to
ensure the coherence and transparency of trade policies through surveillance in
global economic policy-making.
• Another priority of the WTO is the assistance of developing, least-developed and
low-income countries in transition to adjust to WTO rules and disciplines through
technical cooperation and training.
• The WTO is also a center of economic research and analysis: regular
assessments of the global trade picture in its annual publications and research
reports on specific topics are produced by the organization.
There have been various agreements negotiated across GATT and WTO set up
multilaterally. Among them the major ones are:
Agreement on Agriculture
Textiles and Clothing
Trade Related Investment Measures (TRIMS)
Anti-Dumping Measures
Subsidies and Counter-Measures
General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS)
Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS)
Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary(SPS) Agreement
Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT)
Since TRIPS came into force it has received a growing level of criticism from developing
countries, academics, and Non-governmental organizations. Some of this criticism is
against the WTO as a whole, but many advocates of trade liberalization also regard
TRIPS as bad policy. TRIPS' wealth redistribution effects (moving money from people in
developing countries to copyright and patent owners in developed countries) and its
imposition of artificial scarcity on the citizens of countries that would otherwise have had
weaker intellectual property laws are a common basis for such criticisms.
The most visible conflict has been over AIDS drugs in Africa. Despite the role which
patents have played in maintaining higher drug costs for public health programs across
Africa, this controversy has not led to a revision of TRIPs. Instead, an interpretive
statement, the Doha Declaration, was issued in November 2001, which indicated that
TRIPs should not prevent states from dealing with public health crises. After Doha,
Parma, the United States and to a lesser extent other developed nations began working
to minimize the effect of the declaration.
A 2003 agreement loosened the domestic market requirement, and allows developing
countries to export to other countries where there is a national health problem as long
as drugs exported are not part of a commercial or industrial policy. Drugs exported
under such a regime may be packaged or colored differently to prevent them from
prejudicing markets in the developed world.
The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) is a treaty of the World Trade
Organization (WTO) that entered into force in January 1995 as a result of the Uruguay
Round negotiations. The treaty was created to extend the multilateral trading system to
services, in the same way the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)
provides such a system for merchandise trade.
All members of the WTO are signatories to the GATS. The basic WTO principle of most
favoured nation (MFN) applies to GATS as well.
The agreement covers all internationally traded services. It also defines four modes of
trading services:
1. Services supplied from one country to another(e.g. international telephone calls),
officially known as ‘Cross Border Supply’
2. Consumers or firms making use of a service in another country (e.g. Tourism),
officially ‘Consumption Abroad’
3. A foreign company setting up subsidiaries or branches to provide services in
another country (e.g. foreign banks setting up operations in a country), officially,
‘Commercial Presence’
Criticisms
The GATS document has been criticized for allegedly replacing the authority of national
legislature, with the authority of the GATS Disputes Panel. Such allegations argue that
GATS intends to override all "burdensome rules". The WTO and member governments
disagree with such allegations. GATS hearings are closed and held in secret.
While national governments have an option to exclude any specific service from
liberalisation under the GATS, they are also under international pressure to refrain from
so excluding any service "provided on a commercial basis". However, important public
utilities including water and electricity supply most commonly involve purchase by
consumers and are thus demonstrably "provided on a commercial basis". The same
may be said of many health and education services which are sought to be 'exported' by
some countries as profitable industries.
The most notorious privatisation of a public utility occurred in January 2000 when the
government of Bolivia gave control over the water supply of the city of Cochabamba to a
Bechtel Corporation subsidiary, a deal which resulted in a steep price increase,
widespread public protest and the shooting of protesters by troops. When the
corporation was forced to give up, it filed a multimillion-dollar legal demand in a World
Bank tribunal against the government for its loss of potential profits. After persistent
international criticism over several years,
2. The Services Council- subsidiary under the Council for Trade in Services which
deals with financial services, domestic regulations and other specific commitments.
3. Dispute Settlement panels and Appellate Body- subsidiary under the Dispute
Settlement Body to resolve disputes and the Appellate Body to deal with appeals.
The WTO operates on a one country, one vote system, but actual votes have never
been taken. Decision making is generally by consensus, and relative market size is the
primary source of bargaining power. The advantage of consensus decision-making is
that it encourages efforts to find the most widely acceptable decision. Main
disadvantages include large time requirements and many rounds of negotiation to
develop a consensus decision, and the tendency for final agreements to use ambiguous
language on contentious points that makes future interpretation of treaties difficult.
The stated aim of the World Trade Organization (WTO) is to promote free trade and
stimulate economic growth. Some people argue that free trade leads to a divergence
instead of convergence of income levels within rich and poor countries.[1] WTO treaties
have also been accused of a partial and unfair bias toward multinational corporations
and wealthy nations.
Developing countries
Critics contend that small countries in the WTO wield little influence, and despite the
WTO aim of helping the developing countries, the influential nations in the WTO focus
on their own commercial interests. Some examples of this bias are:
* Rich countries are able to maintain high import duties and quotas in certain
products, blocking imports from developing countries (e.g. clothing);
* The increase in non-tariff barriers such as anti-dumping measures allowed
against developing countries;
* The maintenance of high protection of agriculture in developed countries while
developing ones are pressed to open their markets;
* Many developing countries do not have the capacity to follow the negotiations
and participate actively in the Uruguay Round; and
* The TRIPs agreement which limits developing countries from utilizing some
technology that originates from abroad in their local systems (including medicines
and agricultural products).
Decision making
Other critics have characterized the decision making in the WTO as complicated,
ineffective, unrepresentative and non-inclusive; more active participants, representing
more diverse interests and objectives, have complicated WTO decision-making, and the
process of "consensus-building" has broken down. They argue that the GATT decision
making worked in the past because there were fewer countries actively engaged and
there was no compulsion for all countries to adhere to the results. They have thus
proposed the establishment of a small, informal steering committee (a "consultative
board") that can be delegated responsibility for developing consensus on trade issues
among the member countries.
The Third World Network has called the WTO "the most non-transparent of international
organizations", because "the vast majority of developing countries have very little real
say in the WTO system", and proposes the following:
1. The processes of consultations, discussion, negotiations and decision-making in the
WTO have to be made truly transparent, open, participatory and democratic.
2. Any proposals for changes to the rules, or new agreements, or new commitments on
countries should be made known in their draft form to the public at least six months
before decisions are taken.
The economic case for an open trading system based on multilaterally agreed
rules is simple enough and rests largely on commercial common sense. But it is also
supported by evidence: the experience of world trade and economic growth since
the Second World War. Tariffs on industrial products have fallen steeply and now
average less than 5% in industrial countries. During the first 25 years after the war,
world economic growth averaged about 5% per year, a high rate that was partly the
result of lower trade barriers. World trade grew even faster, averaging about 8%
during the period.
The data show a definite statistical link between freer trade and economic
growth. Economic theory points to strong reasons for the link. All countries, including
the poorest, have assets — human, industrial, natural, financial — which they can
employ to produce goods and services for their domestic markets or to compete
overseas. Economics tells us that we can benefit when these goods and services
are traded. Simply put, the principle of “comparative advantage” says that countries
prosper first by taking advantage of their assets in order to concentrate on what they
can produce best, and then by trading these products for products that other
countries produce best.
In other words, liberal trade policies — policies that allow the unrestricted flow of
goods and services — sharpen competition, motivate innovation and breed success.
They multiply the rewards that result from producing the best products, with the best
design, at the best price.
But success in trade is not static. The ability to compete well in particular
products can shift from company to company when the market changes or new
From 1948 to 1994, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)
provided the rules for much of world trade and presided over periods that saw some
of the highest growth rates in international commerce. It seemed well-established,
but throughout those 47 years, it was a provisional agreement and organization.
The original intention was to create a third institution to handle the trade side of
international economic cooperation, joining the two “Bretton Woods” institutions, the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Over 50 countries participated in
negotiations to create an International Trade Organization (ITO) as a specialized