Preface

This book has been commissioned by the WTO as a factual account of its first ten years. It covers the principal activities of the organization over the period of its establishment as the successor of GATT and the embodiment of the global trading system. I have tried to identify the main threads of what has been an important achievement without trying to avoid the controversies. But this book is not a complete record: for that, the reader might want to refer to the Annual Reports of the Organization. These are available as free downloads from the WTO website www.wto.org, in the Resources section, under Publications. All WTO documents and publications referred to in this publication can be downloaded from the same website. The official documents, whose codes are provided in this text, can be found in the Documents online database of the WTO website.