在以前的节目中我们为您介绍过世界贸易组织的前身是 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, 关税及贸易总协定,英文简称是 GATT。它是在一九四七年由二十三个国家在日内瓦签签订的,后来发展到有一百多个成员国。
澳洲广播电台金融节目主持人巴里克拉克介绍了关贸总协成立后的几个回合谈判:
There were seven GATT negotiating rounds held throughout the 1950s, 60s and 70s, which helped free up international trade. But because of a revival of protectionism in the 1970s and 80s, problems began to develop.
The eighth and final GATT round, the Uruguay Round, took place against this background and in the more difficult international economic environment of the 1980s and 90s.
Many of the problems encountered during the Uruguay Round stemmed from an ambitious agenda, which sought to extend the GATT disciplines to areas such as trade in agricultural products and trade in services and intellectual property.
It greatly expanded the scope of the GATT. In the past, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade had focused exclusively on world trade in goods. The Uruguay Round greatly extended the ambit of the coverage to include a new set of issues, services, and it brought intellectual property in.
A third, technical change is that it significantly expanded the completeness of the coverage of the GATT trade rules. There were new disciplines introduced on subsidies. So in fact by the time that round had finished, there was a more complete application of the principles of trade in goods which the original GATT had been designed to cover.
一九九三年,经过七年的磋商,乌拉圭回合谈判宣告结束。一百一十七个成员国共同作出决定,要扩大关贸总协的规模,成立一个新的组织,也就是世界贸易组织 World Trade Organisation,简称WTO。
澳大利亚莫纳什大学的里查德斯纳普教授指出了世贸组织与它的前身关贸总协的不同之处:
One very big change is in the dispute settlement arrangements under the WTO, which are rather different from those under the GATT.
Previously if there was a dispute, there d be a panel which would look at a dispute, and then the panel s report would come to the general body. And the report could only be accepted by consensus. So that that meant that the guilty party, if you like to use that term, could obstruct the acceptance of it.
What occurred in the Uruguay Round was a turning around of this, so the panel s report in examining a case can now only be rejected by consensus, which is a dramatic change and has given the dispute settlement procedure very strong teeth.