Building a trade organization – strengthening the institutional foundations for global trade cooperation

The WTO was created in 1995 in part to place a newly expanded multilateral trading system – the result of the far-reaching Uruguay Round of trade negotiations – on a more secure and permanent institutional foundation. In certain ways, the new institution did not differ dramatically from the GATT that it replaced. The WTO occupied the same headquarters in Geneva, the size of the Secretariat grew only modestly and the Director- General of the GATT became the Director-General of the WTO. The day-to-day work of the WTO – like the GATT – was carried out by member delegations in Geneva, trade officials in national capitals and the WTO Secretariat itself. More fundamentally, the WTO remained an intergovernmental, "memberdriven" organization whose core function was to oversee and administer trade agreements negotiated among sovereign members.