Who is the World Trade Organization governed by?

About the World Trade Organisation

The World Trade Organization (WTO) was established in 1995. Its predecessor organisation was the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The WTO is based in Geneva.

The WTO is the only international organisation dealing with the rules of trade between nations. Its goal is to ensure free, efficient and predictable trade flows. At its heart are the WTO agreements, negotiated and signed by the bulk of the world’s trading nations and ratified by their parliaments. 

The WTO operates a global system of trade rules, acts as a forum for negotiating trade agreements, settles trade disputes between its members and it supports the needs of developing countries. All major decisions are made by the WTO's member governments. The WTO has over 160 members representing 98 per cent of world trade. To join the WTO (known as accession), a government has to bring its economic and trade policies in line with WTO rules and negotiate its terms of entry with the WTO membership. More on the WTO on the WTO website.

The WTO Annual Report summarises the WTO's activities over the past year and provides detailed information on the organization's structure, staff and budget.

The member states webpage lists all member states alphabetically, and provides includes key information on trade statistics, WTO commitments, disputes, trade policy reviews, and notifications for all member states.

The Accessions webpage includes the Accessions Intelligence Portal - this contains information on on-going and completed WTO accessions since 1995 as well as other accession-related information, such as how to become a WTO member, technical assistance activities (including a , relevant publications and other resources. The portal also contains an interactive accessions status map, which links to key information on each member's participation in the WTO.

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WTO Agreements 

Texts of Agreements 

The WTO website provides includes all of the agreements, ministerial decisions, and ministerial declarations reached at the conclusion of the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations in 1994.  It also provides access to post-1994 WTO agreements and protocols.  Summaries and explanatory notes are provided for select agreements.  All agreements can be downloaded as Word or PDF files.  

Click on 'Annotated Agreements & Texts' in the blue menu bar at the top of the homepage. This tool provides fully annotated texts of thirteen principal WTO agreements. The annotations include an Article Citator, Jurisprudence Citator, issue content from WTO jurisprudence, cross-references, incorporated instruments, procedural documents, negotiating history, and precursor texts. The Annotated Agreements & Texts tool also includes the texts of 64 WTO agreements and instruments with links to Article Citator, Jurisprudence Citator, Negotiating History and Precursor Agreements. 

The subject matter of Annotated Agreements & Texts is fully indexed in the Subject Navigator. Select the Subject Navigator from the blue menu bar at the top of the screen.

The open-access part of this platform includes full texts of WTO agreements, as well as ministerial decisions and declarations adopted by the Trade Negotiations Committee. Hover the cursor over 'WTO Cases & Legal Texts' in the green menu bar at the top of the homepage. To view all available Uruguay Round agreements, click on the 'UR Agreements' link.

Negotiating Histories 

Negotiating histories, also known as travaux préparatoires or preparatory works, include the preliminary drafts of a treaty text and other official records generated during the negotiations. These can be found:

(UniMelb staff & students) - click the Negotiating History button on the top menu bar. Includes approximately 1700 Uruguay Round negotiating documents, including the principal negotiating texts and key working group documents.

Includes additional Uruguay Round negotiating documents.

Click By Topic in the red menu and select trade negotiations.

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World Trade Organization (WTO), international organization established to supervise and liberalize world trade. The WTO is the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which was created in 1947 in the expectation that it would soon be replaced by a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) to be called the International Trade Organization (ITO). Although the ITO never materialized, the GATT proved remarkably successful in liberalizing world trade over the next five decades. By the late 1980s there were calls for a stronger multilateral organization to monitor trade and resolve trade disputes. Following the completion of the Uruguay Round (1986–94) of multilateral trade negotiations, the WTO began operations on January 1, 1995.

The ITO was initially envisaged, along with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, as one of the key pillars of post-World War II reconstruction and economic development. In Havana in 1948, the UN Conference on Trade and Employment concluded a draft charter for the ITO, known as the Havana Charter, which would have created extensive rules governing trade, investment, services, and business and employment practices. However, the United States failed to ratify the agreement. Meanwhile, an agreement to phase out the use of import quotas and to reduce tariffs on merchandise trade, negotiated by 23 countries in Geneva in 1947, came into force as the GATT on January 1, 1948.

Although the GATT was expected to be provisional, it was the only major agreement governing international trade until the creation of the WTO. The GATT system evolved over 47 years to become a de facto global trade organization that eventually involved approximately 130 countries. Through various negotiating rounds, the GATT was extended or modified by numerous supplementary codes and arrangements, interpretations, waivers, reports by dispute-settlement panels, and decisions of its council.

During negotiations ending in 1994, the original GATT and all changes to it introduced prior to the Uruguay Round were renamed GATT 1947. This set of agreements was distinguished from GATT 1994, which comprises the modifications and clarifications negotiated during the Uruguay Round (referred to as “Understandings”) plus a dozen other multilateral agreements on merchandise trade. GATT 1994 became an integral part of the agreement that established the WTO. Other core components include the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), which attempted to supervise and liberalize trade; the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which sought to improve protection of intellectual property across borders; the Understanding on Rules and Procedures Governing the Settlement of Disputes, which established rules for resolving conflicts between members; the Trade Policy Review Mechanism, which documented national trade policies and assessed their conformity with WTO rules; and four plurilateral agreements, signed by only a subset of the WTO membership, on civil aircraft, government procurement, dairy products, and bovine meat (though the latter two were terminated at the end of 1997 with the creation of related WTO committees). These agreements were signed in Marrakech, Morocco, in April 1994, and, following their ratification, the contracting parties to the GATT treaty became charter members of the WTO. By the 2020s the WTO had more than 160 members.

The WTO has six key objectives: (1) to set and enforce rules for international trade, (2) to provide a forum for negotiating and monitoring further trade liberalization, (3) to resolve trade disputes, (4) to increase the transparency of decision-making processes, (5) to cooperate with other major international economic institutions involved in global economic management, and (6) to help developing countries benefit fully from the global trading system. Although shared by the GATT, in practice these goals have been pursued more comprehensively by the WTO. For example, whereas the GATT focused almost exclusively on goods—though much of agriculture and textiles were excluded—the WTO encompasses all goods, services, and intellectual property, as well as some investment policies. In addition, the permanent WTO Secretariat, which replaced the interim GATT Secretariat, has strengthened and formalized mechanisms for reviewing trade policies and settling disputes. Because many more products are covered under the WTO than under the GATT and because the number of member countries and the extent of their participation has grown steadily—the combined share of international trade of WTO members now exceeds 90 percent of the global total—open access to markets has increased substantially.

The rules embodied in both the GATT and the WTO serve at least three purposes. First, they attempt to protect the interests of small and weak countries against discriminatory trade practices of large and powerful countries. The WTO’s most-favoured-nation and national-treatment articles stipulate that each WTO member must grant equal market access to all other members and that both domestic and foreign suppliers must be treated equally. Second, the rules require members to limit trade only through tariffs and to provide market access not less favourable than that specified in their schedules (i.e., the commitments that they agreed to when they were granted WTO membership or subsequently). Third, the rules are designed to help governments resist lobbying efforts by domestic interest groups seeking special favours. Although some exceptions to the rules have been made, their presence and replication in the core WTO agreements were intended to ensure that the worst excesses would be avoided. By thus bringing greater certainty and predictability to international markets, it was thought, the WTO would enhance economic welfare and reduce political tensions.

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