What is WTO and its disadvantages

The WTO is a continuation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) which aims to promote the practice of free trade around the world. According to the WTO website it is ‘an organization for liberalizing trade. It’s a forum for governments to negotiate trade agreements.

A disadvantage of the WTO for developing countries is that the WTO makes developing countries dependent on the stronger more powerful core nations. The WTO has put developing countries in a vulnerable position in which they are easily exploited by core nations as the developing countries now depend on the core nations for investment, loans, trade and technology. Due to word restraints we cannot discuss all of the above cases; therefore, this paper will only discuss the technological dependency created by the WTO through analysing intellectual property rights (IPRs). The access to medicines needed to fight diseases became a big issue on the international stage. The developing countries saw the IPRs as a disadvantage as it would make their countries more vulnerable and dependent on the West to provide the medicine which they may otherwise be able to produce, usually cheaper and faster. Whereas Michalopoulos argued that the reason why the pharmaceutical industry was most at risk was because ‘the pharmaceutical industry has not previously enjoyed patent protection in many developing countries, it is the main sector for which the potential losses from TRIPS have been estimated.’