Getting the WTO Back on Track
Clyde V. Prestowitz, Jr.
Founder & President
Economic Strategy Institute
I want to particularly thank all of our panel members. We were comparing travel times just before coming out here. Both Minister Han and Ambassador Barshefsky just arrived today. Probably the best thing we could do would be to give them a good night's sleep - and I think Minister DeSoto holds the record for having come the furtherest. So all have made heroic efforts to be with us today and I, personally, want to thank them very much.
In the fall of 1942, Winston Churchill, then Prime Minister of Britain, and President Roosevelt met on a cruiser in the North Atlantic and began to draft their thinking for what the shape of the world should be like after the end of the second world war. That was the aegis of what came to be known as the North Atlantic Charter; and in the North Atlantic Charter, there was an undertaking by the United States and Great Britain to do two things after the end of the war. The United States agreed to reduce its very high tariffs and Great Britain agreed to do away with imperial preference. Moreover, both countries pledged that they would welcome like-minded countries into a new effort at achieving lower tariffs and more open markets. That pledge was codified after the war in the GATT (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), which, through several rounds of negotiations through the 1950s-'60s, and culminating in the Uruguay Round in the early 1990s, tremendously reduced tariffs and trade barriers and contributed to the growth of international trade; and because international trade has grown faster than most national GDPs, trade has been the engine of world growth for the past fifty years.
The Uruguay Round of course culminated in the transformation of the GATT into the World Trade Organization in an attempt to strengthen the forces and the mechanisms of free trade. And also, in an attempt to deal with the much more complex arena that has developed over the past fifty years. In the early 1950s , the issues were tariffs. Today the issues are regulations, taxations, standards, certifications, environment; many issues that in the past that would have thought to have been domestic issues are now, in fact, international trade issues.
And, as you all know, in the fall of last year, an attempt was made in Seattle to launch a new round of world trade negotiations to deal with many of those complex issues. The round, the talks in Seattle, were suspended without culminating in a new round. And since then, efforts have been underway in the major capitals of the world, and in Geneva, where the WTO is headquartered, to attempt overcome some of the problems that were evident in Seattle; to attempt to deal with some of the procedures that were troublesome; to get these talks back on track; and to further strengthen the World Trade Organization.
And so, here today to tell us, and to sketch out some of the thinking and the concepts for the future, we have our three panelists - and we will begin with Ambassador Barshefsky.