The World Trade Organization

Mission

The WTO states that its aims are to increase international trade by promoting lower trade barriers and providing a platform for the negotiation of trade and to their business.

Principles of the trading system
The WTO discussions should follow these fundamental principles of trading.
1. A trading system should be free of discrimination in the sense that one country cannot privilege a particular trading partner above others within the system, nor can it discriminate against foreign products and services.
2. A trading system should tend toward more freedom, that is, toward fewer trade barriers (tariffs and non-tariff barriers).
3. A trading system should be predictable, with foreign companies and governments reassured that trade barriers will not be raised arbitrarily and that markets will remain open.
4. A trading system should tend toward greater competition.
5. A trading system should be more accommodating for less developed countries, giving them more time to adjust, greater flexibility, and more privileges.

Trade negotiations

While most international organizations operate on a one country, one vote or even a weighted voting basis, many WTO decisions, such as adopting agreements (and revisions to them) are officially determined by consensus of all member states. The advantage of consensus decision-making is that it encourages efforts to find the most widely acceptable decision. Main disadvantages include large time requirements and many rounds of negotiation to develop a consensus decision, and the tendency for final agreements to use ambiguous language on contentious points that makes future interpretation of treaties difficult.

In reality, WTO negotiations proceed not by consensus of all members, but by a process of informal negotiations between small groups of countries. Such negotiations are often called "Green Room" negotiations (after the colour of the WTO Director-General's Office in Geneva), or "Mini-Ministerials", when they occur in other countries. These processes have been regularly criticized by many of the WTO's developing country members which are often totally excluded from the negotiations.

Richard Steinberg (2002) argues that although the WTO's consensus governance model provides law-based initial bargaining, trading rounds close through power-based bargaining favouring Europe and the United States, and may not lead to Pareto improvement.

Membership

The WTO has 150 members (76 members at its foundation and a further 74 members joined over the following years). The 25 states of the European Union are represented also as the European Communities. Some non-sovereign autonomous entities of member states are included as separate members.

The latest member to join was Vietnam (although the Kingdom of Tonga was admitted on 15 December, 2005 during the ministerial conference, Tonga has yet to finalize ratification of this admittance, and is not expected to do so until July 2007).

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