New Director-General of the WTO

In News-Nigeria’s Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was appointed to head the World Trade Organization.

• The WTO’s 164 members unanimously selected the 66-year-old Nigerian economist to serve a four-year term as the Director-General of the organisation.
  • She is the first African official and the first woman to hold the job.

About World Trade Organization

• It is an international institution that oversees the global trade rules among nations.
• It was established in 1995.
• It superseded the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).
  • The GATT traces its origins to the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, which laid the foundations for the post-World War II financial system and established two key institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.
• The main function of the organization is to help producers of goods and services, exporters, and importers protect and manage their businesses.
•  The WTO has 164 member countries, with Liberia and Afghanistan the most recent members, having joined in July 2016, and 23 “observer” countries

• The WTO has many roles:
  • It operates a global system of trade rules.
  • It acts as a forum for negotiating trade agreements.
  • It settles trade disputes between its members and it supports the needs of developing countries.

Importance of WTO for India

• India has visibly benefitted from the open market reforms that it embraced in the early 1990s. Through WTO India can ensure and rule-based global trade regime.
• The dispute settlement body of the WTO is important for India as India has appealed to it seeking exemptions from the import duties on steel and aluminium imposed by the US.
•  India harbours the ambition of becoming a superpower and therefore needs more and more platforms to take up leadership roles as it has been doing at WTO.

Source:IE