Free Economics Dissertations - By: Ade-gbenga Famuboni The Doha Trade Agreement (2001) The Uruguay Round Of
By: Ade-Gbenga Famuboni
The Doha Trade Agreement (2001)
The Uruguay round of 1995, created a body called the World Trade Organisation, which in turn created a new legal structure for multilateral trading globally. Under this new structure all member nations of the World Trade Organisation have equal mutual rights and obligations. Until the WTO was formed, the highest platform for leaders of developing countries to voice their objections and complaints with regard to trade was through GATT. GATT, which is known as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, was the highest body in the world that made trade regulations worldwide, before its elimination in favour of the World Trade Organisation. During that time developing countries who were in the GATT enjoyed all the GATT rights, but were excluded from most of its obligations to liberalize trade on issues such as agriculture, technology, and non-agricultural products and so forth, all across the world; only obligations that applied only to the developed countries were reached. Such special treatment for the industrialized nations was phased out over seven years up to 2002. In the first three years of the WTO, it dealt with 132 complaints; while the GATT only heard of 300 complaints in a forty-seven year period. That is an astonishing difference in relation to what the World Trade Organisation was conceived for in the first place to liberalise free trade all across the world. Its influence has been significant in the measure of dialogue between member nations of the industrialised world and the developing world. In 1997, three strands of negotiations that had been left incomplete in the Uruguay round were completed, involving agreements to lower trade barriers in telecommunications, financial services, and information technology. These agreements were important because they greatly increase the amount of trade covered by WTO rules and dispute settlement procedures; also, they may lead to larger trade volume gains than the entire Uruguay round, in which they completed most of the unfinished business from Uruguay, clearing the way for a new global trade round. For the past 50 years world trade has grown faster than the world GDP. Indeed while GDP has grown seven-fold, world export volumes have grown twenty-one fold (Lipsey and Chrystal, 2004). It is hard to believe that this could have occurred without the liberalization of international trade brought about through successive rounds of tariff negotiations between the industrialized nations and the developing countries.
The Doha round was a key stage of the World Trade Organisation talks in favour of putting developing countries concerns at the heart of the work plan for trade negotiations all across the planet. The talks aim to promote free and fair trade to help developing countries lift themselves up out of poverty.
The Doha Declaration involves negotiations, actions under implementation, analysis and monitoring.
Dissertations - Free Economics Dissertations
