The Uruguay Round was the eighth round of international talks and agreements on economic issues concluded by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), resulting in the creation of the World Trade Organization. It took place from 1986 to 1994 and established rules and principles to cover all global trade. However, it faced criticism for neglecting developing nations.
The Uruguay Round is the name given to the eighth round of international talks and agreements on economic issues concluded by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The Uruguay Round replaced the previous meeting of the GATT which was held in Geneva in 1982. The original meeting took place in Punta del Este, Uruguay in September 1986 and continued until April 1994.
The GATT was created in 1947, due to the inability of several participating governments to agree on a more coherent International Trade Organization (ITO). Following World War II, the world’s wealthiest nations met at the Bretton Woods Conference to create new organizations to help regulate global finance. While two major organizations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, were created without much debate, one regulatory body, initially conceived as the ITO and later more fully realized as the World Trade Organization (WTO), was unable to to get full support from all sides. So for the next 48 years, GATT served as a sort of stop-gap measure, with periodic rounds of agreements to update its role in the global economy.
In 1982, the parties to the GATT issued a Ministerial Statement setting out a number of problems that the GATT was unable to regulate in the world economic structure. Chief among these were the impacts of some member countries’ policies on world trade and some structural deficiencies in the GATT itself. As a result, a new, much more comprehensive set of chords was deemed necessary. Member countries met in Uruguay to begin drafting entirely new structures, review all existing forms of the GATT, and seek a much more cohesive future arrangement.
Four years were initially scheduled for the Uruguay Round, with members discussing and debating implementation during that time and finally signing an agreement in 1990. Negotiations took place in Geneva, Montreal, Washington, DC, Brussels and Tokyo, with countries trying to compromise in their different positions. By 1990, it was evident that at least one major sticking point between the European Union and the United States over agricultural trade reforms would not be resolved in time.
Then the Uruguay Round was extended for another four years. In late 1992 the two sides reached an agreement, in what would become the Blair House Accord, and in April 1994 the new agreement was signed by representatives of nearly all 123 participating countries, in Marakesh, Morocco. One of the major creations of the Uruguay Round was the World Trade Organization, which replaced the GATT, and went into effect on January 1, 1995.
The Uruguay Round was arguably the biggest trade negotiation ever, and it may very well have been the biggest negotiation ever. It established rules and principles to cover all global trade, from banking to consumer products. Many people leveled criticism of the Uruguay Round, with the harshest being that the accord paid scant attention to developing nations that had little say in the meeting and gave preferential treatment to industrialized nations most represented by ministers there. Nonetheless, the Uruguay Round remained the dominant force dictating global trade until the 2001 Doha Development Round.
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