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- 164 members (160 UN member states, the European Union, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan)
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Jan 1, 1995 · At its creation, the World Trade Organization included 125 member countries. Today, there are 164 members. The WTO also includes dozens of observers, which include not only countries but also intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the European Free Trade Organization (EFTA).
- Trade Has Changed The World Economy
- Trade Generates Efficiency Gains
- Trade Has Distributional Consequences
- Explaining Trade Patterns: Theory and Evidence
- Measurement and Data Quality
Trade has grown remarkably over the last century
One of the most important developments of the last century has been the integration of national economies into a global economic system. This process of integration, often called globalization, has resulted in a remarkable growth in trade between countries. The chart here shows the growth of world exports over more than the last two centuries. These estimates are in constant prices (i.e. have been adjusted to account for inflation) and are indexed at 1913 values. The chart shows an extraordin...
The increase in trade has even outpaced economic growth
The chart above shows how much more trade we have today relative to a century ago. But what about trade relative to total economic output? Over the last couple of centuries the world economy has experienced sustained positive economic growth, so looking at changes in trade relative to GDP offers another interesting perspective. The next chart plots the value of traded goods relative to GDP (i.e. the value of merchandise trade as a share of global economic output). Up to 1870, the sum of world...
Trade and trade partners by country
Above, we examined the broad global trends over the last two centuries. Let's now examine country-level trends over this long and dynamic period. This chart plots estimates of the value of trade in goods, relative to total economic activity (i.e. export-to-GDP ratios). These historical estimates obviously come with a large margin of error (in the measurement section belowwe discuss the data limitations); yet they offer an interesting perspective. You can edit the countries and regions selecte...
The raw correlation between trade and growth
Over the last couple of centuries, the world economy has experienced sustained positive economic growth, and over the same period, this process of economic growth has been accompanied by even faster growth in global trade. In a similar way, if we look at country-level data from the last half century we find that there is also a correlation between economic growth and trade: countries with higher rates of GDP growth also tend to have higher rates of growth in trade as a share of output. This b...
Evidence from cross-country differences in trade, growth, and productivity
When it comes to academic studies estimating the impact of trade on GDP growth, the most cited paper is Frankel and Romer (1999).14 In this study, Frankel and Romer used geography as a proxy for trade to estimate the impact of trade on growth. This is a classic example of the so-called instrumental variables approach. The idea is that a country's geography is fixed, and mainly affects national income through trade. So if we observe that a country's distance from other countries is a powerful...
Evidence from changes in labor productivity at the firm level
If trade is causally linked to economic growth, we would expect that trade liberalization episodes also lead to firms becoming more productive in the medium and even short run. There is evidence suggesting this is often the case. Pavcnik (2002) examined the effects of liberalized trade on plant productivity in the case of Chile, during the late 1970s and early 1980s. She found a positive impact on firm productivity in the import-competing sector. She also found evidence of aggregate productiv...
The conceptual link between trade and household welfare
When a country opens up to trade, the demand and supply of goods and services in the economy shift. As a consequence, local markets respond, and prices change. This has an impact on households, both as consumers and as wage earners. The implication is that trade has an impact on everyone. It's not the case that the effects are restricted to workers from industries in the trade sector; or to consumers who buy imported goods. The effects of trade extend to everyone because markets are interlink...
The link between trade and the cost of living
The fact that trade negatively affects labor market opportunities for specific groups of people does not necessarily imply that trade has a negative aggregate effect on household welfare. This is because, while trade affects wages and employment, it also affects the prices of consumption goods. So households are affected both as consumers and as wage earners. Most studies focus on the earnings channel and try to approximate the impact of trade on welfare by looking at how much wages can buy,...
Implications of trade’s distributional effects
The available evidence shows that, for some groups of people, trade has a negative effect on wages and employment opportunities; at the same time, it has a large positive effect via lower consumer prices and increased product availability. Two points are worth emphasizing. For some households, the net effect is positive. But for some households that's not the case. In particular, workers who lose their jobs can be affected for extended periods of time, so the positive effect via lower prices...
Trade diminishes with distance
The resistance that geography imposes on trade has long been studied in the empirical economics literature – and the main conclusion is that trade intensity is strongly linked to geographic distance. The visualization, from Eaton and Kortum (2002), graphs 'normalized import shares' against distance.33Each dot represents a country pair from a set of 19 OECD countries, and both the vertical and horizontal axes are expressed on logarithmic scales. The 'normalized import shares' in the vertical a...
Institutions
Conducting international trade requires both financial and non-financial institutions to support transactions. Some of these institutions are fairly obvious (e.g. law enforcement); but some are less obvious. For example, the evidence shows that producers in exporting countries often need credit in order to engage in trade. The scatter plot, from Manova (2013), shows the correlation between levels in private credit (specifically exporters’ private credit as a share of GDP) and exports (average...
Increasing returns to scale
The concept of comparative advantage predicts that if all countries had identical endowments and institutions, there would be little incentive for specialization because the opportunity cost of producing any good would be the same in every country. So you may wonder: why is it then the case that in the last few years, we have seen such rapid growth in intra-industry trade between rich countries? The increase in intra-industry between rich countries seems paradoxical under the light of compara...
There are dozens of official sources of data on international trade, and if you compare these different sources, you will find that they do not agree with one another. Even if you focus on what seems to be the same indicator for the same year in the same country, discrepancies are large. Such differences between sources can also be found in rich co...
- Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, Diana Beltekian, Max Roser
- 2018
Apr 4, 2022 · The World Bank (WB) helps developing countries improve their access to world markets and enhance their participation in the global trading system. Trade is an engine of growth that creates better jobs, reduces poverty, and increases economic opportunity.
May 14, 2024 · international trade, economic transactions that are made between countries. Among the items commonly traded are consumer goods, such as television sets and clothing; capital goods, such as machinery; and raw materials and food.
Jul 7, 2020 · Latin America, whose vast majority of trade is with the United States, China, and the EU, has a similarly small amount of intraregional trade (17%) as Africa and lags on regional integration, with mainly subregional FTAs.
The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an intergovernmental organization headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland that regulates and facilitates international trade. Governments use the organization to establish, revise, and enforce the rules that govern international trade in cooperation with the United Nations System .
Dec 9, 2016. Who makes the rules for global trade? Image: REUTERS. Rosamond Hutt. After 15 years of arduous negotiations, China finally joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) on 11 December 2001. Fifteen years later, the long road to WTO membership has paid off: China is the world’s leading exporter. It's also the second biggest importer.
