NAVEEN SAKH

WTO
By Naveen Sakh
 NAVEEN SAKH
WTO
• The World Trade Organization (WTO) is
an intergovernmental organization that is concerned
with the regulation of international tradebetween
nations. The WTO officially commenced on 1 January
1995 under the Marrakesh Agreement, signed by 124
nations on 15 April 1994, replacing the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which
commenced in 1948. It is the largest international
economic organization in the world.
• The WTO deals with regulation of trade in goods, services
NAVEEN SAKH
and intellectual property between participating countries by
providing a framework for negotiating trade agreements and
a dispute resolution process aimed at enforcing participants'
adherence to WTO agreements, which are signed by
representatives of member governments:fol.9–10 and ratified
by their parliaments. The WTO prohibits discrimination
between trading partners, but provides exceptions for
environmental protection, national security, and other
important goals. Trade-related disputes are resolved by
independent judges at the WTO through a dispute
resolution process.
• The WTO's current Director-General is Roberto Azevêdo, who leadsNAVEEN SAKH
a staff of
over 600 people in Geneva, Switzerland. A trade facilitation agreement, part
of the Bali Package of decisions, was agreed by all members on 7 December
2013, the first comprehensive agreement in the organization's history. On 23
January 2017, the amendment to the WTO Trade Related Aspects of
Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement marks the first time since the
organization opened in 1995 that WTO accords have been amended, and this
change should secure for developing countries a legal pathway to access
affordable remedies under WTO rules.
• Studies show that the WTO boosted trade, and that barriers to trade would
be higher in the absence of the WTO. The WTO has highly influenced the text
of trade agreements, as "nearly all recent [preferential trade agreements
(PTAs)] reference the WTO explicitly, often dozens of times across multiple
chapters... in many of these same PTAs we find that substantial portions of
treaty language—sometime the majority of a chapter—is copied verbatim
from a WTO agreement.
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Decision-making
• Organization chart
The WTO's top decision-making body is the Ministerial Conference. Below
this is the General Council and various other councils and committees.

• Ministerial conferences
Ministerial conferences usually take place every two years.

• General Council
The General Council is the top day-to-day decision-making body. It meets a
number of times a year in Geneva.
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Criticisms of the WTO aims
• The WTO is very strongly committed to trade liberalization which means a
movement towards free trade both in the reduction and elimination of tariffs and a
removal of non-tariff barriers such as quotas. In fact the first four of the WTO’s
principles (see Basic Facts About the WTO) are all explicity or implicitly about this.
This position (pro free trade) is firmly grounded in main stream trade economics -
particularly comparative advantage theory - which implies that free trade is an
optimal system (in technical terms it is pareto optimal - see glossary). Importantly
it is even good for poor undeveloped countries, hence the WTO’s fifth principle
about development. This, however, is controversial. There are some, particularly in
development studies and development economics, who are doubtful that free
trade and deregulation are in fact good for developing countries or the best
development paradigm. In fact it is often felt that free trade is actually bad in a
variety of ways for poorer countries and beneficial mainly to richer ones.
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• If this is so then the WTO’s philosophy has serious problems
(it’s own principles are mutually contradictory) and the WTO
is at its very basic level biased towards the richer countries.
The other main criticism of the WTO’s philosophy comes
from environmental circles. It is felt that the free
trade/deregulatory paradigm is detrimental to the
environmental protection and preservation. In fact some
environmentalists would argue that the idea of the ultimate
economic good being material improvement (GDP growth)
which is implicit in the WTO’s philosophy is fundamentally
misguided in that it neglects and fails to take into account the
(negative) environmental affects of pursuit of this economic
goal (e.g. global warming).
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Criticism of WTO practices/structure
• Criticism of WTO practices and/or structure focus on the democratic or
undemocratic nature of the organization. The points tend to seperate into two
related arguments. First that the structure and personnel of the WTO is
undemocratic in various ways that lead to developed richer countries winning
out over less developed poorer countries. Second that while not actively biased
or undemocratic the WTO facilitates and permits powerful groups to dominate
the others (these groups being either the richer developed countries or e.g.
TNCs - transnational corporations). Apart from this, the other main criticism of
WTO practices would be that it does not implement its philosophy
evenhandedly, in particular free trade arguments are used to open up the
markets of third world countries while the developed world retains all kind of
protectionist measures. In this view the WTO has just been a method of
institutionalizing the accumalated advantage of developed countries.