facebooktwittertelegramwhatsapp
copy short urlprintemail
+ A
A -
webmaster
Agencies
US President Donald Trump threatened Tuesday to pull the United States out of the World Trade Organization if conditions are not improved.
“We will leave if we have to,” Trump told a cheering audience of workers at a Shell chemical plant in Pennsylvania.
“We know that they have been screwing us for years and it’s not going to happen again,” he said.
Trump has made the WTO the target of many previous attacks, and threatened before to withdraw, claiming unfair treatment toward the US and saying Washington does not have to abide by WTO rulings.
He is especially critical about the terms granted to China when it joined the organization, given US complaints about Chinese theft of American technology.
But the United States in fact has a successful track record of winning disputes mediated by the global trading body.
While calling for reforms to the institution’s rules, the Trump administration also has effectively paralyzed its work.
By blocking naming of new members to the appellate panel part of the Dispute Settlement Body that arbitrates disputes, the system will grind to a halt by the end of the year.
Chad Bown, a trade expert with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said the moves weakening the WTO have done “lasting damage,” not all of which can be reversed.
WTO’s existence would be in doubt if US, others left: Kremlin
The Kremlin said on Wednesday that the existence of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) would be in serious doubt if major economies such as the United States left it, a prospect raised a day earlier by U.S. President Donald Trump.
The Kremlin made the comment in response to a question about U.S. media reports which said Trump had threatened on Tuesday to pull out of the WTO over what he described as the organisation’s unfair treatment of the United States.
“It is obvious that the existence of keystone international economic organisations (like the WTO) would be called into serious question after the exit of the biggest economies on earth,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call.
copy short url   Copy
15/08/2019
552