Already, the formation of the WTO did not halt the proliferation of new RTAs. There has been an enormous increase in Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) in the last twenty years. In fact, RTAs legitimacy is well recognised under GATT/WTO. By their very nature, such arrangements favour imports from members of the grouping and discriminate against imports from other countries. This departure fro...

Despite debuting to little fanfare under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), dispute settlement under the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been called the “backbone of the multilateral trading system.” Indeed, whereas GATT dispute settlement could scarcely have seemed more flawed, the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU) is widely touted for boosting confidence in an in...

Developing countries, by definition, are countries that are less advanced or matured in major areas such as technology and defence, and also have a low Human Development Index, which measures life expectancy, income and the quality of education. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which came into effect in January 1948 and transformed into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Ja...

If one wants to get a grasp on the international institutional arrangement of what J. G. Ruggie called “embedded liberalism,” which included General Agreement Tariffs and Trade (GATT), must first carefully examine conditions that made regime accumulation Fordism possible. More precisely, it is essential how particular evolution class struggle in US strongly influenced organization capitalism th...

Trade is an essential part of economic development. The establishment of WTO is an important milestone in the history of international trade. India played an important role in establishment of GATT and then in establishment in WTO. India became the member of GATT in 1947 and started to play its part and now it’s an active member of WTO, the replacement of GATT, which came into effect on 1st Jan...

assistance and Eric Reinhardt for access to a database of GATT and WTO disputes.

The World Trade Organisation (WTO) which became operational on 1 January 1995 is the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The WTO provides the legal framework for world trade, and it has been given extensive regulatory and supervisory powers. Whereas the GATT was solely concerned with trade liberalization based on tariff concessions, the WTO’s approach embraces discus...

Some economists worry about the ‘spaghetti bowl phenomenon’ expected from proliferating regional trade agreements (RTAs). In particular, the complicated web of hub-and-spoke type of overlapping free trade agreements (FTAs) can result in high costs for verifying rules of origin (RoO) and trade diversion or suppression effects. This explains why almost half of the RTAs notified to the General Agr...