Word: trades
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...high principles behind the WTO are that a global set of agreed principles on trade and related matters will facilitate economic growth and will protect the poor from the power of the rich. These basic points are unexceptionable, except to people who know nothing of history or economic development. Expanded world trade is indeed an engine of development, for rich and poor countries alike. And the rule of law surely beats the rule of the jungle, especially for the weaker countries. The collapse of trade in the Great Depression taught us that lesson in brutal terms...
...predecessor before 1994, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)), have indeed been helpful in expanding trade on a broad front. But trade policy has its low side as well--a battle of narrow interests posturing as national or even international interests. The AFL-CIO is keen to keep out manufactured goods that developing countries can successfully export to the U.S., whether textiles from very low-wage countries or steel from Korea, Brazil and Russia. It marches in Seattle under the hypocritical (or to be more generous, simply erroneous) claim that it represents the interests of the world...
...Seattle. There are a series of truly unsolved problems. Anti-WTO activists are wrong, as a point of fact, to see the WTO as a faceless bureaucracy setting the world's rules, but they are right that the negotiating process, by which the U.S. and other countries bargain over trade standards, is opaque and mostly hidden from view. Its not the WTO's bureaucracy per se that's the problem, it's the behavior of the member governments, including, or perhaps especially, our own. The first problem, therefore, is how to achieve greater democracy in international negotiating contexts...
...second problem is one of standards. The activists are incensed that the WTO dispute settlement boards can rule that duly enacted U.S. laws are contrary to the WTO. This they claim is undemocratic on its face. But the critique is foolish: the whole point of international trade agreements is to bind the parties to a set of shared standards (that they have mutually adopted), so that they don't engage in unilateral actions to the detriment of others. The fact that such unilateral actions are democratically enacted within a member country is beside the point...
...which the U.S. Congress agreed in 1994 --are appropriate. The environmentalists say no, because under WTO rules a country generally can't stop the import of goods from countries on the basis of whether or not we like how those goods have been produced. The U.S. and European trade unions say no, because under WTO rules we generally can't stop the import of goods from countries on the basis of how the workers are treated or how much they earn...