Was the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade Successful

APEC is examining the prospects and options for an Asia-Pacific Free Trade Area (FTAAP) that would include all APEC member countries. Since 2006, the APEC Business Advisory Council, which has theorized that a free trade area has the best chance of bringing member states together and ensuring stable economic growth within the framework of free trade, has advocated the creation of a high-level working group to study and develop a plan for a free trade area. The proposal for a PIA was born out of the lack of progress in the World Trade Organization`s Doha Round negotiations and as a means of overcoming the "spaghetti bowl" effect created by the overlap and contradiction of countless elements of countless free trade agreements. There are about 60 free trade agreements, and another 117 are being negotiated in Southeast Asia and the Asia-Pacific region. The agreement opened the door to open trade, ended tariffs on various goods and services, and imposed equality between Canada, America and Mexico. NAFTA has allowed agricultural products such as eggs, corn and meat to be duty-free. This allowed companies to trade freely and import and export various goods at the North American level. GATT members remove barriers to trade through regular rounds of negotiations, each resulting in an agreement that must be ratified by all members before it enters into force. Although these negotiations usually take place in small groups, the resulting concessions are extended to all members by the most-favoured-nation rule, which accords each member the same treatment as the most-favoured-nation trading partner. The most-favoured-nation rule ensures that any liberalization carried out during GATT rounds is not discriminatory. By 2006, eight cycles had been completed: Geneva (1947), Annecy (1949), Torquay (1951), Geneva (1956), Dillon (1960-1961), Kennedy (1964-1967), Tokyo (1973-1979) and Uruguay (1986-1994).

A ninth, Doha, began in 2001. These rounds lowered global tariffs on industrial products from nearly 40% in 1947 to less than 4% in 2006. These tariff reductions are considered one of the most important achievements of the GATT system. The GENERAL AGREEMENT ON TARIFFS AND TRADE – the world`s largest multinational trust agreement – and the International Secretariat that oversees its activities are both called GATT. More than 100 countries are signatories, and many more align their trade policies with their regulations. Although Cold War tensions excluded some countries, including the Soviet Union and the Chinese governments in Taipei and Beijing, GATT was the main international trade agreement affecting the vast majority of world trade. In the 1990s, the end of the Cold War led to the integration of the countries of the former Eastern bloc into the GATT negotiations. The concept of such an approach to international trade policy arose from Anglo-American bilateral discussions during World War II and was aimed at alleviating the economic problems of the post-war period. In the original plan, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were to be joined by the International Trade Organization (ILO), which was to regulate trade. The General Agreement, which emerged from the Havana Conference in 1947, was drafted only as a temporary measure to stabilize world trade until the ILO took power.

When the U.S. Senate refused to approve the ITO Charter, President Harry S. Truman decided to join gatt by executive order. Twenty-two other countries joined the United States in supporting the new agreement, which included many provisions in the ITO Charter but had no enforcement powers provided. Gatt has managed to survive and remain effective, mainly thanks to the goodwill of Member States, the benefits they derive from trade expansion and their desire to avoid retaliation from other countries that support it. Despite the lack of a rigid structure and implementing powers, GATT played an important role in reducing or eliminating high barriers to trade between Western industrialized countries, thus contributing to the Great Depression of the 1930s and the beginning of World War II. The most influential group was the informal quadrilateral group, or the so-called "quad", which emerged at the beginning of GATT`s history. The group included Canada, Japan, the United States and the European Union – the largest trading companies in the world at the time. With the Quad, most of the reciprocal GATT tariff reductions were introduced, which reduced tariff rates for all GATT countries in accordance with the most-favoured-nation principle. Quad biking became a more formal alliance at the 1981 G7 summit in Montebello, Quebec. It had the most influence during the Uruguay Round when it prioritized agricultural negotiations and pushed for the creation of the WTO.

The GATT contains not only provisions of varying normativity, but also provisions more or less related to the central objectives of the agreement. In some cases, they reflected issues that were important then, but are less important for the development of the agreement or that are relevant today. In this note, I will focus mainly on the fundamental provisions of the agreement, which reflect the main objective of trade liberalisation, but I will refer to provisions that have been of lesser importance in the past, some of which have gained in importance with the entry into force of the WTO. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), signed on 1 October. 30, 1947, from 23 countries, was a legal agreement that minimized barriers to international trade by eliminating or reducing quotas, tariffs, and subsidies while maintaining important regulations. Gatt aimed to stimulate economic recovery after World War II by rebuilding and liberalizing world trade. Regardless of its provisional and provisional nature, the GATT operated for almost 50 years before being incorporated into the WTO. The Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations, which culminated in the WTO, did not change the GATT. Rather, GATT has been included as one of the multilateral agreements on trade in goods such as GATT 1994.

These include GATT 1947, the legal agreements which entered into force when GATT was applied in 1947, all protocols and certificates of tariff concessions under GATT, all accession protocols, all derogations granted under GATT and agreements on the interpretation of certain GATT provisions. In short, everything that had happened under GATT was included in the WTO as GATT in 1994. The original GATT 1947 has been kept intact, although it is now part of the GATT 1994. All this has become known in the WTO as the "GATT acquis". One of the most important achievements of GATT has been trade without discrimination. Each signatory member of gatt should be treated as equivalent to any other. This is called the most-favoured-nation principle and it has been adopted in the WTO. In practice, it follows that once a country has negotiated a tariff reduction with other countries (usually its main trading partners), the same reduction automatically applies to all GATT signatories. There were fallback clauses that allowed countries to negotiate exemptions if their domestic producers were particularly harmed by tariff reductions. The GATT was created to create rules to end or limit the most costly and undesirable features of the pre-war protectionist period, namely quantitative barriers to trade such as trade controls and quotas. The agreement also provided for a system for settling trade disputes between nations, and the framework allowed for a series of multilateral negotiations on the elimination of tariff barriers. Gatt was considered a significant success in the post-war years.

The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) is a forum for 21 Pacific Rim countries (officially members) that aims to promote free trade and economic cooperation throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Founded in 1989 in response to the growing interdependence of Asia-Pacific economies and the emergence of regional economic blocs (such as the European Union) in other parts of the world, APEC strives to raise living standards and education levels through sustainable economic growth and to promote a sense of community and appreciation of common interests among Asia-Pacific countries. The objective of GATT was to eliminate harmful trade protectionism. Trade protectionism likely contributed to a 66% decline in world trade during the Great Depression. Gatt helped restore the world`s economic health after the devastation of the Depression and World War II. The average level of tariffs for the main GATT participants in 1947 was about 22%. [4] As a result of the first rounds of negotiations, tariffs in the GATT core of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia were reduced compared to other parties and non-GATT participants. [4] In the Kennedy Round (1962-67), the average tariff level of GATT participants was about 15%. [4] After the Uruguay Round, tariffs were below 5%.

[4] The details of the GATT have been optimized in the decades since its creation. The main objective of the ongoing negotiations was to further reduce tariffs. In the mid-1960s, the Kennedy Round added an anti-dumping agreement. The Tokyo Round in the 70s improved other aspects of trade. The Uruguay Round lasted from 1986 to 1994 and created the World Trade Organization. The reduction of tariffs through trade negotiations has been an important success of the GATT. At the time of the GATT, there were eight rounds of negotiations, which culminated in the Uruguay Round, which also led to the creation of the WTO. Initially, the rounds of negotiations took place on a bilateral basis within the framework of a "supply and demand system" in which each country identified other countries for which it was willing to reduce tariffs in exchange for reciprocal tariff reductions in favour of the candidate country. The tariff reduction agreement resulting from these negotiations was called tariff binding.

Later, "rounds" were carried out more on a multilateral basis, with agreement on "global" tariff reductions. .