Foreword

The World Trade Report 2007 is the fifth in a series launched in 2002. This year’s Report marks sixty years of multilateralism in trade through the GATT/WTO. On 1 January 1948 the GATT came into being with 23 signatories. Six decades on, at the beginning of next year, we celebrate a WTO with over 150 Members. This is an institution that has changed and grown in fascinating ways, striving to meet the challenges posed by increasingly complex trade relations in a globalizing world. The GATT/WTO has evolved from its comparatively modest focus in the early years on reducing and binding tariffs on manufactured goods to encompass a deeper and wider set of disciplines across a range of policy areas. At the same time, over sixty years the system has brought together a growing number of nations at different levels of development, with varied policy priorities, in a cooperative endeavour to forge an international trade policy regime that promises mutual gain.