The WTO at ten: Building on ten years of achievements

The creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) on 1 January 1995 represented a major turning point for the multilateral trading system. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was superseded by a fully fledged international organization with a stronger and more automatic dispute settlement apparatus and a broader remit. The governments of WTO Members had a much bigger stake in their new trading system, they held high expectations about what it should achieve, and at the same time they also recognized that the WTO would face some onerous tasks in its early years. The Uruguay Round Agreements had to be implemented, and a new and more complex institutional framework had to be built on top of that existing under the GATT. New subjects covering vast areas, such as services and intellectual property rights, had to be incorporated into the multilateral trading system for the first time.