Fifty Years of Trade Policy: The Policy Lessons

F IVE major lessons for successful global trade management, defined as steady reductions in barriers and maintenance of an effective rules-based system, emerge from the first fifty years of the GATT/WTO. They need to be applied to the present situation to set the stage for another half century of successful multilateral trade cooperation. I will summarise the key headings at the outset and then elaborate each, concluding with proposals for the WTO agenda for the early part of the twenty-first century.