Multilateral trade negotiations and the developing countries

The Multilateral Trade Negotiations (MTNs) were launched under the auspices of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in September 1973 at a ministerial meeting held in Tokyo, where the well known Tokyo Declaration was adopted, setting out the objectives and areas of the negotiations. The negotiations aimed at achieving the expansion and ever greater liberalisation of world trade through the progressive dismantling of obstacles to trade and the improvement of the international framework for the conduct of world trade. One of the commitments of the Tokyo Declaration was to secure additional benefit for the international trade of developing countries so as to achieve a substantial increase in their foreign exchange earnings, the diversification of their exports, the acceleration of the rate of growth of their trade, taking into account their development needs, an improvement in the possibilities for these countries to participate in the expansion of world trade, and a better balance as between developed and developing countries in the sharing of the advantage resulting from this expansion. The Tokyo Declaration further embodied a recognition of the importance of applying special and more favourable treatment to developing countries where feasible and appropriate. The MTNs constitute a comprehensive and massive undertaking, cover a multiplicity of extremely complex legal and technical issues, involve a large number of governments with divergent interests, and have produced several codes, agreements and exchanges of concessions in tariff and non-tariff fields. The main purpose of this paper is to give a brief and general picture of the concerns of developing countries in the MTNs, their initial objectives and expectations, the efforts made by them to achieve those objectives, the modalities and processes involved in the negotiations, and the results obtained

Business · Declaration · Developing country · Economic growth · Economics · International economics · International trade · Liberalization · Market economy · Multilateral trade negotiations · Negotiation · Political science · Tariff · Trade barrier · Global trade and economics · Law

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