70th anniversary of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
Seventy years ago, on 30 October 1947, 23 countries signed the Final Act of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Devised as a temporary agreement that would boost international trade, the GATT regulated world trade for almost 50 years before being succeeded by the birth of the World Trade Organization in 1995.
To mark the signing of the GATT in 1947, a UN press release announced: “There is no parallel to this achievement in any previous trade negotiations, all of which have been on a more limited scale. The completion of such a large number of simultaneous negotiations of such broad scope in a little over six months is in itself a remarkable feat.”
How the Agreement came into being
The lead negotiators profoundly disagreed on the level of ambition to be achieved by the negotiations but finally overcame their profound differences.
- Clash of the GATT negotiators
- GATT 1947: How Stalin and the Marshall Plan helped to conclude the negotiations
- GATT 1947 and the grueling task of signing
- 1947 press release announcing the signing of the GATT
- PIIE’s Trade Talks podcast: Happy 70th GATTiversary—The Origins of Multilateral Trade
Source:wto.org
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