GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade)

The Uruguay Round trade agreement, recently ratified by Congress, was the eighth in a series of negotiations under the auspices of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Like the ratification proceddings, the negotiations were both contentious and extended. In the end, they substantially changed the structure of the GATT. From its traditional emphasis on reducing formal barriers to trade in goods, the GATT has now moved to a broader agenda of issues that will dominate in a more integrated world economy. The new GATT encompasses a set of agreements governing trade in goods, trade in services, the protection of intellectual property rights, and new procedures for resolving trade disputes. All of these measures are to be unified under a new institutional structure, the World Trade Organization. In this book, the major features of the new GATT are reviewed and assessed in terms of their implications for the United States. The contributors are Alan Deardorff, University of Michigan; Bernard Hoekman, the World Bank; John Jackson, University of Michigan School of Law; and Tim Josling, Food Research Institute, Stanford University. Susan M. Collins is a senior fellow in the Economic Studies program at Brookings and associate professor of economics at Georgetown University. Barry P. Bosworth, a senior fellow at Brookings, is the editor and author of numerous Brookings books, including The Chilean Economy: Policy Lessons and Challenges (Brookings, 1994) and Saving and Investment in a Global Economy (Brookings, 1993).

This work evaluates the interaction between developing countries & the multilateral trading system since World War II & describes the achievements & failures of the Uruguay Round of the Multilateral Trade Negotiations in that context. Among other issues, it addresses possible linkages between trade policies & environmental & labor standards, the opportunities & threats regionalism poses to a global trading system, & the consequences for developing countries of cooperation between the World Trade Organization (WTO), the IMF, & the World Bank.

The World Trade Organization is likely to be a major international organization for the foreseeable future. This volume, the first full-length study of the WTO and GATT from the viewpoint of public choice and political economy, details the mechanics of the multilateral trading system that emerged from the Uruguay Round of GATT. The authors, who were involved in the negotiations of the Uruguay Round, explain why WTO rules are phrased the way they are, the successes and failures of WTO and GATT, and how business, industrial associations and political lobbies influence the multilateral trading system.

The importance of the issues raised by the WTO Agreement cannot be over-estimated. The completion of the Uruguay Round of negotiations has resulted in the creation of international agreements which themselves raise issues of great difficulty and importance in legal terms, and of practical importance for international trade in goods and services and for the entire field of intellectual property rights. This book, written by experts from throughout the world, examines the implementation of the GATT Agreement and its national and international legal and constitutional ramifications. There is a chapter on each major trading entity and selected other nations. Each of these chapters describes and analyses the important constitutional issues regarding the procedures for approving the Uruguay Round treaty agreements and implementing them in domestic law.