Tuesday, October 5, 2010

U.S. Trade Policy Extremely Open, World Trade Organization Finds

(America.gov)

“The U.S. trade and investment regimes are among the most open in the world,” the World Trade Organization (WTO) Secretariat reported September 29 in its 10th review of the trade policies and practices of the United States.

“Like most other WTO Members, the United States very largely resisted pressures to respond to the global economic recession by tightening restrictions on imports,” the Secretariat reported in its executive summary. “The restraint shown by the United States helped forestall a worldwide slide into protectionism.”

Because surveillance of national trade policies is fundamentally important to the work of the WTO, the organization has established a trade policy review mechanism under which all WTO members are examined periodically. The frequency of each country’s review varies according to its share of world trade. The previous review of U.S. trade policies took place in 2008. Read more here.