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South Africa

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Earlier, I mentioned the unilateral consequences of trade protection policies between cooperating nations or economies. Now let us look at the multilateral effects that this can pose. Research shows that membership in trade organizations like the World Trade Organization (WTO) haven't and will not play a significant effect on trade. In the early 90s, Africa signaled a very important shift in its developmental strategy. This shift was from the promotion of the continent's exports while controlling imports, to a more open view on tariff liberalization . This paradigm shift, can mostly be seen in the commitment South Africa showed in General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade GATT (the predecessor to the WTO). Within the GATT, South Africa agreed …show more content…

These include developed member countries v. developing member countries, new member countries v. old developing member countries, imports of member countries from other member countries v. imports from non-member countries, free v. protected sectors in member countries. Member countries in the WTO who are industrial, have been found to be more receptive and open than the developing member countries. new member countries have been found to be more open, than the old member countries. Especially since the old member countries do not have stringent obligations to liberalize trade, they are not more open than the nonmember countries. The non-member countries have often not benefitted equally from free trade than their counterparts who are member countries (this is because the trade imports from WTO member countries are higher than those from non-member countries) .
This situation created the differentiation by two types of discrimination. These are explicit discrimination and de-facto discrimination. The former shows that trade barriers are higher against the imports from non-member countries compared to imports from member countries . While the latter shows trade barriers to be higher on products of greater interest to non-member countries; as they have not been the main subject of reciprocity negotiations in an organization like the WTO. The WTO does have varying impacts on

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