The World Trade Organization

“The World Trade Organization (WTO) is the only global international organization dealing with the rules of trade between nations. At its heart are the WTO agreements, negotiated and signed by the bulk of the world’s trading nations and ratified in their parliaments. The goal is to help producers of goods and services, exporters, and importers conduct their business.” (World Trade Organization)

The World Trade Organization was developed in the mid 1990’s. It is located in Geneva, Switzerland with one hundred fifty nine countries currently enrolled. The development of the World Trade Organization was due to negotiations between countries for their products. One of the main functions of the World Trade Organization is to settle trade disputes between countries. The organization sets up procedures and processes for each country to trade. The procedures and processes will detail what each country expects from one another in order for them to trade their products in their country. The organization will negotiate tariffs or taxes that each country deems necessary and other documentation that is required before the product can enter into the country. I will give you a real world example from my current employer. I work as an Inventory Control Analyst for a global manufacturer of heavy equipment. When we are sourcing parts from vendors and supplier we demand that these suppliers give us certain documentation. The documentation that we ask for is Country of Origin, which means where the supplier is getting their parts from. We need to know what country the parts are coming from. We also ask for weight and dimensions. Some of the countries we ship our parts into require that we provide a valid weight and dimension on each product. When our company sells a machine, we also are required to house a database which contains all of this information for the customer. Some of our customers want to know exactly where each and every part on our machine