Free Trade Agreements and Trading Blocs

The postwar architecture of global trade rules began with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), signed in 1947 by 23 founding contracting parties in the aftermath of the Great Depression's protectionist spiral and the collapse of world trade it produced. GATT operated through a series of negotiating rounds that progressively lowered tariffs, culminating in the Uruguay Round, launched in 1986 and concluded in 1994, which expanded the trading system's scope to services and intellectual property and established the World Trade Organization (WTO) as a permanent institution headquartered in Geneva, effective 1 January 1995, with a formal dispute-settlement mechanism that GATT itself had lacked.