countries cannot make their industries globally competitive, they will experience a decline in their people’s standards of living. Judging the results of these arguments, will allow me to decide whether or not the WTO is in need of reform, abolishment, or if it should continue without alteration.The basic premise of the WTO is to open up trade between nations, and one of its potential disadvantages is that its operation is dictated largely by the needs of its economically dominant members (S-11 Online 2001). These members dominate, because they also house the major multinational corporations which make up a large quantity of the country’s export trade. In this sense, the political side of international trade is a very important one. For example, what is good for General Electric – a leading US corporation - must be good for the US, but not necessarily beneficial for other international industries (APEC Branch 1999). In this sense, the needs of General Electric are favoured by the US Government, who in order to protect this leading corporation of theirs manipulate trade barriers so that countries competing with the US, cannot profitably export the same goods General Electric sells. The opposite is therefore true, that if a country cannot sell certain goods to other nations profitably, or even at all, it must abandon that industry and move onto ‘greener pastures’. The sad irony is that moving to ‘greener pastures’ means moving towards a more industrialised economy where the needs of workers, farmers and small business are ignored (Callaghan 2001). To show sympathy and compassion for such globally useless industries would mean the government would either have to subsidise their excess production cost, or impose trade barriers on the cheaper imports which threatened their production in the first place. Such an action, under the WTO’s rules and agreements, is illegal under any pretence,...
