The World Trade Organization and Trade Governance

The World Trade Organization was established on January 1, 1995, under the Marrakesh Agreement signed in April 1994, concluding the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations that had run from 1986 to 1994 under the WTO's predecessor framework, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), itself provisionally applied since 1947 as one of the Bretton Woods era's trade pillars after an original plan for a full International Trade Organization collapsed when the U.S. Congress declined to ratify it. Headquartered in Geneva, the WTO extended GATT's tariff-reduction mandate into new areas, including services (through the General Agreement on Trade in Services, GATS) and intellectual property (through the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, TRIPS), and, unlike GATT, was established as a full international organization with permanent legal personality. Its foundational principles include most-favored-nation treatment, requiring members to extend to all other members any trade advantage granted to one, and national treatment, requiring imported goods to be treated no less favorably than domestically produced equivalents once inside a member's market.