Many countries
of the world are signatories to the
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
or GATT, established in Jan.1948.
Now known as World Trade Organization
web-site at www.wto.org since 1995 with 132 member countries, which agreed to exchange most-favored-nation customs treatment.
This means that the contracting parties agreed that each will accord to the importer goods, benefit of the lowest duties.
The General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)
came into force on January 1st. 1948, now taken over by
WTO on January 1995
(as well as assuring most-favored -nation treatment among the contracting parties), provides for scheduled tariff concessions and lays down rules and regulations to govern the conduct of international trade.
The first round of GATT tariff negotiations at Geneva in 1947 involved more than one hundred bilateral negotiations and the results were consolidated into a single comprehensive annex to the Agreement, divided into schedules. These schedules covered some 45,000 separate tariff items.
Subsequent rounds of tariff negotiations at Annecy in 1949, at Torquay in 1950-51, at Geneva in 1956 and again in 1960-61. And more recently, eight negotiating trade rounds under GATT (that took 8 years), ending with the 1994 Uruguay Round brought tariffs in industrialized countries down to single digit figures.
Declarations made at the end of the Uruguay Round stipulate that negotiations in agriculture must begin by 1999 and on the service sector no later than 2000.
The World Trade Organisation or WTO
At the WTO's first meeting in Singapore in December 1996, trade ministers from 28 member countries signed an Information Technology agreement which aims to eliminate tariffs on trade in electronic commerce such as downloading of a book or software, duty free by year 2000...
....before the next
WTO's
Ministerial multilateral trade conference in New York City (USA) on November
1999 - which shall endorse the preparation of a new round of negotiations, to be
known as "Millennium
Round".
The World Trade
Organization www.wto.org
was born in 1995, today with more than 132 members
WTO is the new look face of what is previously known as
GATT
which was a loosely enforced agreement with a tiny secretariat and no real dispute mechanism.
Whereas,
WTO with its mandate also deals with trade and in-services and has hundreds of experts at Geneva, (Switzerland) headquarters, and a system to examine trade rows, issue verdicts and monitor whether countries at fault comply with their international obligations.
WTO members are prohibited from using import quotas. However, some exceptions are allowed, such as for agricultural and fisheries products when such quotas are non-discriminatory between one supplying country and another.
There are some exceptions to this rule. For example, there are provisions that the preferences exchanged among members of the British Commonwealth may not be extended to countries outside the Commonwealth, on the grounds that these tariff preferences were in existence before the entry into force of the
GATT.
Import quotas may also be used temporarily by a member country if it is suffering from a balance of payment crisis. In such a case, the
import quotas may be used in discriminatory fashion against countries with that have a payment imbalance.
Similarly, preferences exchanged exclusively between the United States and the Philippine Republic or between France and its overseas possessions, and other similar arrangements based on historical, political or geographical grounds, are exempt from the application of the most-favored-nation principle.
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The EEC, Tading Block, Non Tariff Barrier
"The combined population of
'EEC' exceed 300 million people. This is compared favorably in size with the populations of U.S.A."
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