World Trade Organization

World Trade Organization (WTO), international organization established to supervise and liberalize world trade. It began operations on January 1, 1995. The WTO is the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which was created in 1947.

Views on WTO
Lew Rockwell argued against WTO's creation, since international trade requires no regulatory bureaucracy. In 1994, he argued that it would allow economic exchange with some countries under approved conditions, and impose a variety of sanctions on others, such as preferences for labor unions, artificially high labor costs, controls on the organization of industry, high taxes on capital and income, central-bank inflation, invasive tax collection, and abolition of financial privacy. In 1999, Rockwell asserted that the WTO is mainly concerned with expanding its own power and jurisdiction, which means it has no principled objection to making international trade a vehicle for the promotion of "labor rights" and crippling environmental regulations.

In a Bloomberg article, the WTO has been described as a "a disarmament treaty for mercantilists."

Links

 * World Trade Organization home page
 * Profile: World Trade Organization, BBC
 * Stop the WTO by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., February 1994
 * Sayonara, WTO by Jeffrey Tucker, April 1997
 * Party Time at the WTO by James Sheehan, July 1997
 * This Isn't Free Trade by James Sheehan, July 1999
 * Birth of the WTO by James M. Sheehan, February 2000
 * Myths of the WTO by Jeffrey Tucker, May 2003
 * The Good, the Bad, and the Hungry: An Analysis of Food Protectionism in Hungry Agrarian Countries (pdf) by Leo Adrianus
 * Myths of the WTO by Jeffrey Tucker, May 2003
 * The Good, the Bad, and the Hungry: An Analysis of Food Protectionism in Hungry Agrarian Countries (pdf) by Leo Adrianus
 * The Good, the Bad, and the Hungry: An Analysis of Food Protectionism in Hungry Agrarian Countries (pdf) by Leo Adrianus