Revitalizing the World Trade Organization
October 15, 2020
Clete Willems
I. Introduction
All three pillars of the World Trade Organization (WTO)
have played a key role in promoting “rules-based” international trade for the past twenty-five years.
1. The negotiations creating the WTO were a major success, leading to a broad range of new rules that prohibit members from raising tariffs beyond agreed-upon levels, restrict non-tariff barriers, and ban discriminatory trade measures. Since then, a few negotiations have helped further lower barriers, including the Trade Facilitation Agreement(TFA) and Information Technology Agreement (ITA). Today, average applied tariffs are approximately half of what they were when the WTO was created, and numerous unfair trade practices have been discontinued.2
2. Implementation and Monitoring: The WTO recognizes that the implementation and monitoring of commitments are essential to maintaining the integrity of an effective rules-based system. Accordingly, the WTO includes mechanisms to track implementation and rules that require members to notify it of changes in trade policies and share information on trade-distorting practices (e.g., subsidies). Transparency and information sharing promote business predictability, while the discussion of trade-distorting policies often leads to their modification or abandonment before adoption.
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