Taxing, Regulating, and Trading Carbon: An Introduction to the Symposium

The global trade liberalization project has been one of the most successful efforts at international cooperation ever. Estimates of industrial nations ’ average tariffs in 1947, when the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was negotiated, range from 20 – 40 percent. 1 The World Bank reports that in 1994, the year before the World Trade Organization (WTO) came into existence, the global applied average weighted tariff was still 8.57 percent. 2 Twenty years later, that number had fallen below 3 percent, and many developed nations, including the United States and the European Union (EU), have applied average tariffs around 1.5 percent. 3 Beyond tariff rates, the GATTexpanded from twenty-three original parties to the WTO ’ s 164. Along with over three hundred regional free trade agreements and customs unions currently in force, the WTO has also reduced non-tariff barriers to trade in goods and liberalized trade in services. 4 From a historical, economy-wide perspective, we live in a world that the GATT framers would likely have thought approximates free trade. Trade liberalization bene fi ts: helping rebuild Europe and Japan after solidi-fying support during and lifting millions of people worldwide out of trade liberalization Workers face increased disruptions to their prospects and long-term economic security due to competition from countries in which the state provides substantial comparative certain creating And low trade, along falling few they