Uruguay Round Essay ⋆ Business Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Begun in 1986, the Uruguay Round was the largest round of trade negotiations under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), with 123 countries participating. The negotiations of the Uruguay Round had a very broad agenda and included agreements pertaining to trade in agriculture, manufactured goods, services, intellectual property, and other products. The negotiations concluded on April 15, 1994, and led to the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in January 1995.

In the years immediately after the conclusion of World War II, there was a strong international consensus to develop supranational institutions and agreements that would foster peace, stability, and cooperation among nations. In the area of trade, efforts were made to create an International Trade Organization (ITO), which would serve to create and implement international trade policies with a goal of reducing trade barriers, resolving trade disputes, and enforcing multilateral trade agreements. The attempt to create an ITO failed in 1948, but the effort did lead to GATT, signed by 23 countries and including over 45,000 trade concessions affecting about $10 billion of trade (one-fifth of the world’s total at the time).

Progress Through The Creation Of GATT

GATT consisted of a series of eight rounds of negotiations with each round focusing on different sets of core issues, but with all rounds designed to reduce barriers to trade, in a broad multilateral process. The early GATT rounds focused on further reducing tariffs on an ever-wider array of products. The agenda shifted slightly in the 1960s with the Kennedy Round, which added an antidumping agreement and a section on development, and was signed by 62 countries. In the 1970s, the Tokyo Round included agreements on nontariff barriers for the first time and also introduced various reforms to the overall GATT system, and was agreed to by 102 countries. The multilateral approach to reducing trade barriers culminated in the Uruguay Round, begun in Punta del Este in 1986 and concluding in Marrakesh, Morocco, in 1994, with a final agreement signed by 123 participating countries.

The initial negotiating agenda for the Uruguay Round aimed to extend GATT to cover trade in services and intellectual property, and to introduce reforms to the sensitive areas of agricultural and textile trade. The trade ministers from member countries put all of the original GATT articles up for review and set forth an aggressive four-year time line for the process. This marked the first time that multilateral trade negotiations had included discussion of national agricultural policies with the intent of creating a more market-oriented agricultural trading environment through the reduction of government agricultural support programs. These programs frequently led to surplus production in developed countries, to the detriment of agricultural producers in less-developed countries.

Two years into the process, ministers met in Montreal, Canada, to assess progress, and set forth a more detailed agenda for the remaining two years. At that point, agreements had been reached on market access for tropical products, a streamlined dispute settlement system, and the creation of the Trade Policy Review Mechanism, which provided for regular reviews of GATT member nation trade policies.

In 1990, ministers met in Brussels, Belgium, with the intent of concluding the Uruguay Round. Instead, disagreements over agricultural trade reforms thwarted these plans and put the entire process in jeopardy. New deadlines were agreed upon and were then missed, as the political environment for free trade deteriorated and new issues were brought up that made reaching a consensus even more difficult. Significant ideological differences between the United States and the European Union (EU) were at the center of the conflict.

Finally in 1992, the United States and the EU settled their differences in an agreement that came to be known as the Blair House Accord. Progress continued over the next year, with agreement being reached among the United States, Canada, Japan, and the EU. More than eight years after the process had begun, the Uruguay Round came to an end with the signing of a final agreement. As in other GATT rounds, however, this agreement also included an agenda for additional negotiations in the future. This agenda formed the basis for what has come to be known as the Doha Round of trade negotiations.

The impact of the Uruguay Round has been somewhat mixed. In the area of agriculture, there have been relatively small reductions in national agricultural subsidies among developed nations and many of the objectives of the Uruguay Round provisions have yet to be realized. In other areas, however, such as intellectual property rights, significant progress toward the Uruguay Round objectives has been made.

Bibliography:

Kym Anderson, “The WTO Agenda for the New Millenium,” Economic Record (1999);
Bhagirath Lal Das, An Introduction to the WTO Agreements (Zed, 1998);
Alejandro Jara and Carmen M. Dominguez, “Liberalization of Trade in Services and Trade Negotiations,” Journal of World Trade (v.40/1, 2006);
Don Kenyon and David Lee, The Struggle for Trade Liberalisation in Agriculture: Australia and the Cairns Group in the Uruguay Round (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2006);
Will Martin and L. Alan Winters, The Uruguay Round and the Developing Countries (Cambridge University Press, 1997);
Brian McDonald, The World Trading System: The Uruguay Round and Beyond (Palgrave Macmillan, 1998);
World Trade Organization, The Legal Texts: The Results of the Uruguay Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations (World Trade Organization, 2008).

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