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The World Trade Organization Essay

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The World Trade Organization is an intergovernmental organization that is mandated with the responsibility of regulating international trade. Each country in the world is considered to be endowed with limited resources that make it impossible for these countries to produce each and every good and service that they deem essential for their citizens’ consumption. It is on the basis of different and limited resource endowment that countries embark on the process of trading amongst themselves so as to export what they have in abundance to other countries and to import what their lack. The formation of the World Trade Organization was officially done on 1st January, 1995, and was done under the Marrakesh Agreement (Abreu, 1998). The organization, nevertheless, came into existence after about 124 member countries came together and agreed to form the organization. It is worth noting that the WTO was formed so as to replace the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which commenced its operation in 1948.
The formation of WTO can be traced back to the Bretton Woods Conference in which prominent economists such as John Maynard Keynes and Harry White advocated for the formation of a controlled international trade environment. They also recommended the formation of a strong global financial institution that could effectively cater for the financial issues of different countries across the world. The predecessor of the WTO, which was the GATT, was, thus, formed after the

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