A brief history of the WTO and GATT
The World Trade Organization (WTO) and its pre- decessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) have been enormously successful over the last 50 years at reducing tariff and other trade barriers among an ever-increasing number of countries. The predecessor to the WTO began in 1947 with only 23 members; today it has 146 members, comprising ap- proximately 97 percent of world trade.1 See box 1 for a timeline of GATT and the WTO.2
Although the WTO, established in 1995, is rela- tively young for an international institution, it has its origins in the Bretton Woods Conference at the end of World War II. At this conference, finance ministers from the Allied nations gathered to discuss the failings of World War I’s Versailles Treaty and the creation of a new international monetary system that would sup- port postwar reconstruction, economic stability, and peace. The Bretton Woods Conference produced two of the most important international economic institu- tions of the postwar period: the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruc- tion and Development (the World Bank). Recognizing that the beggar-thy-neighbor tariff policies of the 1930s had contributed to the environment that led to war, min- isters discussed the need for a third postwar institu- tion, the International Trade Organization (ITO), but left the problem of designing it to their colleagues in government ministries with responsibility for trade.3