On other issues, the Tokyo Round has had mixed results. It has failed to address the fundamental problems of agricultural trade and has also presented an amended agreement on „safeguard measures“ (emergency import measures). Nevertheless, a number of agreements on non-tariff barriers have emerged from the negotiations, in which, in some cases, existing GATT rules have been interpreted and, in other cases, completely new paths have been taken. In most cases, only a relatively small number of GATT members (mainly industrialized) have signed these agreements and arrangements. As they were not accepted by full GATT members, they were often informally referred to as „codes“. For the time being, GATT has limited scope for action, but its success in promoting and securing much of world trade in 47 years is undeniable. Continued tariff reductions alone contributed to very strong growth in world trade in the 1950s and 1960s – an average of about 8% per year. And the dynamics of trade liberalization have helped ensure that trade growth consistently outpaces output growth throughout the GATT era, a measure of countries` growing ability to trade with each other and reap the benefits of trade. The onslaught of new members during the Uruguay Round showed that the multilateral trading system has been recognized as an anchor for development and as an instrument for economic and trade reform. The original intention was to establish a third institution to deal with the trade dimension of international economic cooperation and join the two Bretton Woods institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
More than 50 countries participated in the negotiations for the establishment of an International Trade Organization (IIO) as a specialized agency of the United Nations. The draft ITO Charter was ambitious. It extended beyond the disciplines of world trade and included rules for employment, commodity agreements, restrictive business practices, international investment and services. The goal was to create the ITO at a United Nations conference on trade and employment in Havana, Cuba, in 1947. The claim that Section 24 could be applied in this way has been criticized as unrealistic by Mark Carney, Liam Fox and others, as paragraph 5c of the contract requires that an agreement be reached between the parties for paragraph 5b to be useful, as there would be no agreement in the event of a „no deal“ scenario. In addition, critics of the GATT 24 approach point out that services would not be covered by such an agreement. [28] [29] Following the UK`s vote to leave the EU, supporters of leaving the EU suggested that Article 24(5B) of the Treaty could be used to maintain a „status quo“ in trade conditions between the UK and the EU in the event that the UK leaves the EU without a trade deal, thus preventing the introduction of customs duties. According to proponents of this approach, it could be used to implement an interim agreement until a final agreement of up to ten years is negotiated.
[25] At the same time, PREPARATORY meetings on GATT were held at the UNCTE. After several of these meetings, 23 countries signed GATT on 30 October 1947 in Geneva, Switzerland. It entered into force on 1 January 1948. [12] [8] The practice of consensus decision-making constituted an obstacle to the proper functioning of dispute settlement under the GATT 1947. The decision to establish an expert group required consensus, and a decision to support the recommendation of an expert group also required consensus. In any event, this meant that the support of the party against whom the dispute had been brought and, in the case of the recommendation of the panel report, the support of the losing party were necessary. A major change in the context of WTO dispute settlement was the reversal of the consensus rule, so there had to be a consensus against the establishment of a panel and a consensus to reject a panel`s recommendation. Thus, the WTO adopted the GATT dispute settlement system and effectively transformed it into a mandatory and binding process. 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 of lesser importance in the development of the agreement or that are important 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 of lesser importance in the past, some of which have become very important with the entry into force of the WTO. GATT was first discussed at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Employment in Havana, Cuba (1947), where the idea of creating the International Trade Organization (ITO) was proposed (see United Nations). .