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Excerpts
Background Note
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The GATT
It was in 1946-47 that talks on the creation of an International Trade Organization (ITO) alongside the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank began. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), was signed by 23 countries in end-October 1947, bringing the trade provisions of the proposed ITO into effect on January 1, 1948...
The WTO
In 1993, the Uruguay Round participants agreed to replace GATT with a more powerful trade body, The World Trade Organization (WTO). WTO was established on January 1, 1995...
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Seattle Ministerial Conference, 1999
As WTO negotiations progressed, differences between the developed and the developing countries intensified with regard to what came to be known as the
'implementation' issue. They covered a range of questions arising from the wide perception in the developing world:
• that the Uruguay Round and its agreements enshrined in the WTO were asymmetric, imbalanced and iniquitous to the developing countries...
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The Cancun Ministerial Conference
As the next ministerial conference in Cancun, Mexico approached, hopes were again raised. An analysis by the World Bank, published on September 3rd 2003, suggested that an ambitious, though achievable, reduction of trade barriers in the Doha round could boost global income by between $290 billion and $520 billion a year.
Well over half of these gains would go to poor countries. By 2015, the World Bank reckoned, a successful Doha round could lift 144 million people out of poverty... |
Excerpts Contd...>>
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