From 1948 to 1994, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) provided the rules for much of world trade and presided over periods that saw some of the highest growth rates in international commerce. It seemed well-established, but throughout those 47 years, it was a provisional agreement and organization.

The original intention was to create a third institution handling international economic cooperation, to join the “Bretton Woods” institutions now known as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The complete plan, as envisaged by over 50 countries, was to create an International Trade Organization (ITO) as a specialized agency of the United Nations. The draft ITO Charter was ambitious. It extended beyond world trade disciplines, to include rules on employment, commodity agreements, restrictive business practices, international investment, and services.

Even before the charter was finally approved, 23 of the 50 participants decided in 1946 to negotiate to reduce and bind customs tariffs. With the Second World War only recently ended, they wanted to give an early boost to trade liberalization, and to begin to correct the large legacy of protectionist measures which remained in place from the early 1930s.

This first round of negotiations resulted in 45,000 tariff concessions affecting $10 billion of trade, about one-fifth of the world’s total. The 23 also agreed that they should accept some of the trade rules of the draft ITO Charter. This, they believed, should be done swiftly and “provisionally” in order to protect the value of the tariff concessions they had negotiated. The combined package of trade rules and tariff concessions became known as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. It entered into force in January 1948, while the ITO Charter was still being negotiated. The 23 became founding GATT members (officially, “contracting parties”).

Although the ITO Charter was finally agreed at a UN Conference on Trade and Employment in Havana in March 1948, ratification in some national legislatures proved impossible. The most serious opposition was in the US Congress, even though the US government had been one of the driving forces. In 1950, the United States government announced that it would not seek Congressional ratification of the Havana Charter, and the ITO was effectively dead. Even though it was provisional, the GATT remained the only multilateral instrument governing international trade from 1948 until the WTO was established in 1995.

In the early years, the GATT trade rounds concentrated on further reducing tariffs. Then, the Kennedy Round in the mid-sixties brought about a GATT Anti-Dumping Agreement. The Tokyo Round during the seventies was the first major attempt to tackle trade barriers that do not take the form of tariffs, and to improve the system. The eighth, the Uruguay Round of 1986-94, was the latest and most extensive of all. It led to the WTO and a new set of agreements.

Sir Eric Wyndham-White (UK) 1948–68
Olivier Long (Switzerland) 1968–80
Arthur Dunkel (Switzerland) 1980–93
Peter Sutherland (Ireland) GATT 1993–94; WTO 1995
Renato Ruggiero (Italy) 1995–1999
Mike Moore (New Zealand) 1999–

The Tokyo Round lasted from 1973 to 1979, with 102 countries participating. It continued GATT’s efforts to progressively reduce tariffs. The results included an average one-third cut in customs duties in the world’s nine major industrial markets, bringing the average tariff on industrial products down to 4.7%. The tariff reductions, phased in over a period of eight years, involved an element of “harmonization” — the higher the tariff, the larger the cut, proportionally.

In other issues, the Tokyo Round had mixed results. It failed to come to grips with the fundamental problems affecting farm trade and also stopped short of providing a new agreement on “safeguards” (emergency import measures). Nevertheless, a series of agreements on non-tariff barriers did emerge from the negotiations, in some cases interpreting existing GATT rules, in others breaking entirely new ground. In most cases, only a relatively small number of (mainly industrialized) GATT members subscribed to these agreements and arrangements. Because they were not accepted by the full GATT membership, they were often informally called “codes”.

They were not multilateral, but they were a beginning. Several codes were eventually amended in the Uruguay Round and turned into multilateral commitments accepted by all WTO members. Only four remain plurilateral — those on government procurement, bovine meat, dairy products and civil aircraft remain “plurilateral”. (In 1997, WTO members agreed to terminate the bovine meat and dairy agreements from the end of the year.)

 
 
Did GATT succeed?  back to top

GATT was provisional with a limited field of action, but its success over 47 years in promoting and securing the liberalization of much of world trade is incontestable. Continual reductions in tariffs alone helped spur very high rates of world trade growth during the 1950s and 1960s — around 8% a year on average. And the momentum of trade liberalization helped ensure that trade growth consistently out-paced production growth throughout the GATT era, a measure of countries’ increasing ability to trade with each other and to reap the benefits of trade. The rush of new members during the Uruguay Round demonstrated that the multilateral trading system was recognized as an anchor for development and an instrument of economic and trade reform. But as time passed new problems arose. The Tokyo Round was an attempt to tackle some of these but its achievements were limited. This was a sign of difficult times to come.

GATT’s success in reducing tariffs to such a low level, combined with a series of economic recessions in the 1970s and early 1980s, drove governments to devise other forms of protection for sectors facing increased foreign competition. High rates of unemployment and constant factory closures led governments in Western Europe and North America to seek bilateral market-sharing arrangements with competitors and to embark on a subsidies race to maintain their holds on agricultural trade. Both these changes undermined GATT’s credibility and effectiveness.

The problem was not just a deteriorating trade policy environment. By the early 1980s the General Agreement was clearly no longer as relevant to the realities of world trade as it had been in the 1940s. For a start, world trade had become far more complex and important than 40 years before: the globalization of the world economy was underway, trade in services — not covered by GATT rules — was of major interest to more and more countries, and international investment had expanded. The expansion of services trade was also closely tied to further increases in world merchandise trade. In other respects, GATT had been found wanting. For instance, in agriculture, loopholes in the multilateral system were heavily exploited, and efforts at liberalizing agricultural trade met with little success. In the textiles and clothing sector, an exception to GATT’s normal disciplines was negotiated in the 1960s and early 1970s, leading to the Multifibre Arrangement. Even GATT’s institutional structure and its dispute settlement system were giving cause for concern.

These and other factors convinced GATT members that a new effort to reinforce and extend the multilateral system should be attempted. That effort resulted in the Uruguay Round, the Marrakesh Declaration, and the creation of the WTO.