Fifty Years of Trade Policy: The Policy Lessons

Five 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 GATT/WTO. They need to be applied to the present situation to set the stage for another half century of successful multilateral trade cooperation. This article summarizes the key headings at the outset and then elaborates each, concluding with proposals for the WTO agenda for the early part of the twenty-first century.