International Economic- WTO - Essay Example

The most important round of negotiations in the history of WTO was the Uruguay Round in 1986 which resulted in significant agreement on negotiation topics. The meeting before that in 1982 had resulted in deadlock over agriculture issues. The Uruguay Round resulted in an agreement over ‘a negotiating agenda’ which covered all the trade policy issues required to be discussed (World Trade Organization, 2010). Over the years, the WTO’s agenda has had to expand from just an agreement on trade terms to include issues related to regionalism, intellectual property, services, the environment, investment, electronic commerce and labour standards (World Trade Organization, 2010).

1 ‘Balance-of-payments exception’: developing countries were allowed to have less stringent terms in tariff conditions and they were allowed to protect their markets to some level because of the special status to protect them. ‘exports subsidies’: WTO promotes the elimination of export subsidies in agriculture in order to have free competitive market conditions in global agricultural trade. The implementation of this clause is more one-sided and it is the developed countries that specifically demand the elimination of export subsidies in developing countries; and ‘domestic support’: developed countries are promoting the elimination of all other forms if domestic support besides export subsidies that challenge the free competitive market conditions.

(World Trade Organization, 2010) The latest agreement on the agriculture front is laid out in August 2007. According to these agreements, in developed countries, there was to be a reduction in tariff and a calculation of the Ad Valorem Equivalent (AEV) tariff. 4-6% of the tariff could be proclaimed for sensitive products. It was also agreed that there was a necessity to ‘formulate an adequate solution for tariff escalation’. Tax simplification was another clause of the 2007 Draft