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Global Trade in relation to students and young professionals

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Global Trade in relation to students and young professionals

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I think that so often the things we do not see affect our day to day living seem unimportant to us. This is a great perspective and I believe it is important to educate ourselves on these matters even if they do not seem of immediate importance. It is very neat to see the strides that the WTO is trying to make in order to form a relationship/ link between global trade and students.

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News

WTO interaction with students/young professionals

WTO Young Trade Leaders Programme

The Young Trade Leaders Programme aims to foster a better understanding of the WTO's work and international trade among young people by creating a network of "Young Trade Leaders" around the world. People between the ages of 18 and 28 who have a strong interest in international trade are encouraged to apply. The programme for each new cohort lasts one year.

Young Professionals Programme

The WTO Young Professionals Programme provides an opportunity for qualified young professionals from developing and least-developed members of the WTO to enhance their knowledge regarding the WTO and international trade issues. The programme aims to attract professionals from members under-represented in the WTO Secretariat. The selected young professionals are allocated to a specific division of the WTO Secretariat for one year.

WTO 101

Each year, the WTO hosts an exclusive student-only event focused on global trade and its impact. Details about the 2025 event and how to register are available here.

Essay Award for Young Economists

The WTO has established an annual WTO Essay Award for Young Economists. The award, which carries a prize of CHF 5,000, aims to promote high-quality economic research on the WTO and WTO-related issues and to reinforce the relationship between the WTO and the academic community.

WTO Chairs Programme

The WTO Chairs Programme aims to enhance understanding of the trading system by stimulating teaching, research and public debate on international trade at universities and research institutions in developing and least-developed countries. Under the programme, academia, students and trade law experts undertake research of relevance to government policy makers and other stakeholders. The Programme comprises a total of 39 institutions.

Jackson Moot Court Competition

The John H. Jackson Moot Court on WTO Law is a simulated hearing of the WTO dispute settlement system. The teams prepare and analyse a fictive case and present their arguments both for the Complainant and the Respondent in front of a Panel which consists of WTO and trade law experts. Universities from around the world participate in the competition.

Public Forum

The Public Forum is the WTO's largest annual outreach event, which provides a platform for participants to discuss the latest developments in world trade and to propose ways of enhancing the multilateral trading system. The event regularly attracts over 1,500 representatives, including civil society, business, governments, parliamentarians, inter-governmental organizations, academics and students.

Student group visits to the WTO

Institutions wishing to organize a student group visit to the WTO should address their request to:

Videos

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The WTO is the only international body dealing with the rules of trade between nations. At its heart are the WTO agreements, the legal ground-rules for international commerce and for trade policy.

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This incredibly informative and insightful article was an exceptional read. It clearly gives you a visual of the global market, company expansion, shifting of markets, and the struggle of the global markets. This article was written in 2012 but it discusses IBM's success story and it was very eye opening to read that they projected by 2015 to have 30% of their revenue come from emerging markets.  Markets such as Africa and Asia. So much money is generated from trade.

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As the economic spotlight shifts to developing markets, global companies need new ways to manage their strategies, people, costs, and risks.

Managing global organizations has been a business challenge for centuries. But the nature of the task is changing with the accelerating shift of economic activity from Europe and North America to markets in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. McKinsey Global Institute research suggests that 400 midsize emerging-market cities, many unfamiliar in the West, will generate nearly 40 percent of global growth over the next 15 years. The International Monetary Fund confirms that the ten fastest-growing economies during the years ahead will all be in emerging markets. Against this backdrop, continuing advances in information and communications technology have made possible new forms of international coordination within global companies and potential new ways for them to flourish in these fast-growing markets.

There are individual success stories. IBM expects to earn 30 percent of its revenues in emerging markets by 2015, up from 17 percent in 2009. At Unilever, emerging markets make up 56 percent of the business already. And Aditya Birla Group, a multinational conglomerate based in India, now has operations in 40 countries and earns more than half its revenue outside India.

But, overall, global organizations are struggling to adapt. A year ago, we uncovered a "globalization penalty": high-performing global companies consistently scored lower than more locally focused ones on several dimensions of organizational health. For example, the former were less effective at establishing a shared vision, encouraging innovation, executing "on the ground," and building relationships with governments and business partners. Equally arresting was evidence from colleagues in McKinsey's strategy practice showing that global companies headquartered in emerging markets have been growing faster than counterparts headquartered in developed ones, even when both are operating on "neutral turf": emerging markets where neither is based (see " Parsing the growth advantage of emerging-market companies ").

Over the past year, we've tried to understand more clearly the challenges facing global organizations, as well as approaches that are helping some to thrive. Our work has included surveys and structured interviews with more than 300 executives at 17 of the world's leading global organizations spanning a diverse range of sectors and geographies, a broader survey of more than 4,600 executives, and time spent working directly with the leaders of dozens of global organizations trying to address these issues.

Clearly, no single organizational model is best for all companies handling the realities of rapid growth in emerging markets and round-the-clock global communications. That's partly because the opportunities and challenges facing companies vary, depending on their business models. R&D-intensive companies, for example, are working to staff new research centers in the emerging world and to integrate them with existing operations. Firms focused on extracting natural resources are adapting to regulatory regimes that are evolving rapidly and sometimes becoming more interventionist. Consumer-oriented firms are facing sometimes-conflicting imperatives to tailor their businesses to local needs while maintaining consistent global processes.

Another reason no single model fits all global companies is that their individual histories are so different. Those that have grown organically often operate relatively consistently across countries but find it hard to adjust their products and services to local needs, given their fairly standardized business models. Companies that have mainly grown through M&A, in contrast, may find it easier to tailor operations to local markets but harder to integrate their various parts so they can achieve the potential of scale and scope and align a dispersed workforce behind a single set of strategies and values.

Although individual companies are necessarily responding differently to the new opportunities abroad, our work suggests that most face a common set of four tensions in managing strategy, people, costs, and risk on a global scale. The importance of each of these four tensions will vary from company to company, depending on its particular operating model, history, and global footprint. (For more on the implications of these uneven globalization efforts, see " Developing global leaders.") Taking stock of the status of all four tensions can be a useful starting point for a senior-management team aiming to boost an organization's global performance.

Strategic confidence and stretch

Being global brings clear strategic benefits: the ability to access new customer markets, new suppliers, and new partners. These immediate benefits can also create secondary ones. Building a customer base in a new market, for example, provides familiarity and relationships that may enable additional investments-say, in a research center.

But being global also brings strategic challenges. Many companies find it increasingly difficult to be locally flexible and adaptable as they broaden their global footprint. In particular, processes for developing strategy and allocating resources can struggle to cope with the increasing diversity of markets, customers, and channels. These issues were clear in our research: fewer than 40 percent of the 300 senior executives at global companies we interviewed and surveyed believed that their employers were better than local competitors at understanding the operating environment and customers' needs. And barely half of the respondents to our broader survey thought that their companies communicated strategy clearly to the workforce in all markets where they operate.

People as an asset and a challenge

Many of the executives we interviewed believed strongly that the vast reserves of skills, knowledge, and experience within the global workforce of their companies represented an invaluable asset. But making the most of that asset is difficult: for example, few surveyed executives felt that their companies were good at transferring lessons learned in one emerging market to another.

At the same time, many companies find deploying and developing talent in emerging markets to be a major challenge. Barely half the executives at the 17 global companies we studied in depth thought they were effective at tailoring recruiting, retention, training, and development processes for different geographies. An emerging-market leader in one global company told us that "our current process favors candidates who have been to a US school, understand the US culture, and can conduct themselves effectively on a call with head office in the middle of the night. The process is not designed to select for people who understand our market."

One of our recent surveys showed how hard it is to develop talent for emerging markets at a pace that matches their expected growth. Executives reported that just 2 percent of their top 200 employees were located in Asian emerging markets that would, in the years ahead, account for more than one-third of total sales. Complicating matters is the fact that local highfliers in some key markets increasingly prefer to work for local employers (see " How multinationals can attract the talent they need "). Global companies are conscious of this change. "Local competitors' brands are now stronger, and they can offer more senior roles in the home market," noted one multinational executive we interviewed.

Scale and scope benefits, complexity costs

Large global companies still enjoy economic leverage from being able to invest in shared infrastructure ranging from R&D centers to procurement functions. Economies of scale in shared services also are significant, though no longer uniquely available to global companies, as even very local ones can outsource business services and manufacturing and avail themselves of cloud-based computing.

But as global companies grow bigger and more diverse, complexity costs inevitably rise. Efforts to standardize the common elements of essential functions, such as sales or legal services, can clash with local needs. And emerging markets complicate matters, as operations located there sometimes chafe at the costs they must bear as part of a group centered in the developed world: their share of the expense of distant (and perhaps not visibly helpful) corporate and regional centers, the cost of complying with global standards and of coordinating managers across far-flung geographies, and the loss of market agility imposed by adhering to rigid global processes.

Risk diversification and the loss of familiarity

A global company benefits from a geographically diverse business portfolio that provides a natural hedge against the volatility of local growth, country risk, and currency risk. But pursuing so many emerging-market opportunities is taking global companies deep into areas with unfamiliar risks that many find difficult to evaluate. Less than half of the respondents to our 2011 survey thought these organizations had the right risk-management infrastructure and skills to support the global scale and diversity of their operations.

Furthermore, globally standard, exhaustive risk-management processes may not be the best way to deal with risk in markets where global organizations must move fast to lock in early opportunities. One executive in an emerging-market outpost of a global company told us "a mind-set that 'this is the way that we do things around here' is very strongly embedded in our risk process. When combined with the fact that the organization does not fully understand emerging markets, it means that our risk process might reject opportunities that [the global] CEO would approve."

Understanding these tensions is just a starting point. Capturing the benefits and mitigating the challenges associated with each will require global companies to explore new ways of organizing and operating.

About the author(s)

Martin Dewhurst is a director in McKinsey's London office, where Suzanne Heywood is a principal; Jon Harris is a director in the New York office.

The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of Kate Aquila and Roni Katz to the development of this article.

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As the economic spotlight shifts to developing markets, global companies need new ways to manage their strategies, people, costs, and risks. Managing global organizations has been a business challenge for centuries. But the nature of the task is changing with the accelerating shift of economic activity from Europe and North America to markets in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

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I have really taken interest in this module because, I of course was always aware of global trade and global markets however never really dove far enough into them to realize how massive an effect they have on the economy.

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Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Feng Li/Getty Images and Timothy A. Clary/Getty Images.

On May 24, 2000, Bill Clinton clinched what many believed would be the last great legislative victory of his presidency. That afternoon, the House of Representatives voted to award China permanent normal trade relations, effectively backing Beijing's long-in-the-making bid to join the World Trade Organization. The historic deal had been Clinton's top priority in the waning days of his last term-a move he hoped would improve relations with the world's most populous nation, while cementing his own legacy of using free trade to advance America's foreign policy interests. It had been opposed by labor unions wary of competition from poorly paid foreign workers and championed by corporations salivating over 1.3 billion potential Chinese customers (the business lobby had spent millions on TV ads supporting the pact). In the end, after much wrangling, 73 Democrats joined 164 Republicans to pass the agreement, which was expected to glide through the Senate.

"This is a good day for America," Clinton said afterward. "In 10 years from now we will look back on this day and be glad we did this. We will see that we have given ourselves a chance to build the kind of future we want."

Things have not worked out quite as the 42 nd president hoped. Normalizing trade with China set our rival on a path to becoming the industrial powerhouse the world knows today, decimating American factory towns in the process and upending old assumptions about how trade effects the economy. Thanks to a growing body of academic research, we're only just now beginning to understand the extent of the economic fallout, as well as the degree to which it has helped poison our politics. If you want to understand why Donald Trump's furious message about trade resonates with so much of the public, and has helped him come within striking distance of defeating Hillary Clinton and taking the White House, you have to start with another Clinton's choice at the end of his term.

Clinton's reasons for embracing trade with China had as much to do with geopolitics as economics. By the late 1990s, the People's Republic was a fast-growing but relatively cloistered economy dominated by a government whose human rights record could be summed up with the words Tiananmen Square. But after years of false starts, its leadership had become determined to join the WTO, the club of nations that sets the ground rules for international trade. This was no small commitment-gaining membership would require China to strike individual deals with the group's 135 members to ease tariffs and open itself to foreign companies. In part, that meant giving its own citizens more leeway to run businesses.

Embracing those sorts of economic liberties, Clinton argued, might one day lead the Communist Party to allow more political liberties as well. "By joining the WTO, China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products; it is agreeing to import one of democracy's most cherished values: economic freedom," the president said in a March 2000 speech.

Former Ambassador Charlene Barshefsky, who served as the U.S. trade representative under Clinton and helped negotiate China's deal with the U.S., explained to me that given China's size, its involvement on the world stage was "an almost foregone conclusion." With that in mind, what mattered was how it would happen: "Would it go in a direction antithetical to Western norms? Or could it be encouraged to go in a direction that was compatible to Western norms?"

In 1999, the White House hashed out its agreement with Beijing. China would drop tariffs and other trade barriers tripping up U.S. farmers and companies. In return, the U.S. would support China's WTO application, phase out some quotas that limited Chinese textile imports, and (most importantly) give it permanent most favored nation trade status. What, exactly did that mean? China had enjoyed the same low tariffs on its exports to the U.S. as most other countries since 1979. But, under an old Cold War-era law, the president and Congress were essentially required to renew those trade rights each year, a bit of political theater that often involved airing all sorts of grievances about China's rights record. (They were nevertheless renewed each time, without fail.) Making trade relations permanent eliminated that thorny annual ritual-in short, it would take Beijing off probation.

Most experts did not see this as a particularly large concession, since nothing, as far as they could tell, would fundamentally change about the U.S. and China's trade relationship. Paul Krugman, who was pro-normalization, and would go on to win a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on trade, spoke for many when he called it "an issue whose symbolic importance is much larger than its direct economic implications." Clinton, for his part, argued the U.S. was essentially getting something for nothing. "Economically, this agreement is the equivalent of a one-way street," he said in March 2000. "It requires China to open its markets-with a fifth of the world's population, potentially the biggest markets in the world-to both our products and services in unprecedented new ways. All we do is to agree to maintain the present access which China enjoys."

Supporters of the deal didn't just tout its benefits for Americans. They also argued that voting against it would handicap U.S. businesses in the future. China technically only needed support from two-thirds of the WTO's members, even if it was expected to strike bargains with all of them, so it would join the group regardless of Washington's qualms. And if Congress refused to grant China trade permanent status, Beijing would be allowed to continue shutting out American companies even as it opened its market to their foreign competition. "If Congress votes yes, the United States will benefit. If it votes no, only its economic competitors will benefit," wrote the Washington Post's editorial board, in support of normalization.

It's striking, in retrospect, just how small supporters of normalization seemed to think the economic stakes of the deal really were. The U.S. International Trade Commission, for instance, produced an analysis suggesting that if Beijing joined the WTO, the U.S. economy would grow by just $1.7 billion. Gary Hufbauer and Daniel Rosen of the Peterson Institute for International Economics suggested that, with permanent normal trade relations, U.S. exports to China would enjoy a one-time jump of $5.4 billion. Without it? They'd pop up $2.4 billion. The difference to the U.S. economy would be like an extra rock or two tossed into Lake Michigan.

Labor unions and their allies thought otherwise. Already angry over the North American Free Trade Agreement, which had drawn some manufacturing production into Mexico, they argued that a deal with China would send more factory work overseas. Some of their predictions seemed apocalyptic. The Economic Policy Institute's Robert Scott suggested that our roughly $70 billion deficit with China might double or more in 10 years, costing the U.S. some 817,000 jobs. (Hufbauer and Rosen called those calculations "an absurd extrapolation.")

In hindsight, the fears weren't absurd at all. In the months immediately after Congress voted to normalize trade with China, dozens of U.S. corporations announced that they were moving manufacturing overseas. And once China officially joined in the WTO in 2001, the country rapidly began transforming into an export behemoth as foreign investment and factory work flooded into the country-its surplus with United States alone rose from $83 billion in 2001 to more than $295 billion in 2011. During the same 10-year period, U.S. manufacturing employment, which had stayed essentially steady in the years after NAFTA, declined from about 17.1 million to 11.8 million. Manufacturing had been withering as a share of America's labor market for many, many years. But the shockingly fast collapse of the early 2000s simply convulsed blue-collar communities.

Were all 5 million of those job losses due to trade with China? Not at all-many likely disappeared as machines replaced human labor in factories. Did American manufacturing vanish altogether? Nope-output actually reached all-time highs before the Great Recession. But starting in 2013, economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson, along with other collaborators, began publishing a series of papers showing that manufacturing employment had declined significantly more in parts of the United States where local businesses faced stiff competition from Chinese imports, compared with places where industry was less exposed. Between 1999 and 2011, the authors estimated, about 985,000 American manufacturing jobs were wiped away by China's export boom. Adding in the restaurants, movie theaters, and other businesses that wilted as plants shuttered, the researchers estimated that the " China shock," as they dubbed it, cost the U.S. some 2 million to 2.4 million jobs- spread from the Rust Belt to the South to the far corners of New England.

Much of this flew in the face of conventional economics. The textbook line on free trade was that while it created winners and losers, the effects were supposed to show up in people's paychecks, not in raw jobs numbers. For a country like the U.S., trading with a country like China or Mexico should push down wages a bit for less educated workers as factory work moved away, and increase wages for more educated workers, whose salaries would stretch a little further thanks to inexpensive cars, TVs, and T-shirts. People who lost work, it was assumed, would generally adjust by moving-either into a new industry, or a new town with better prospects.

How had the economists, and the administration, gotten it so wrong? The most popular answer among politicians is currency manipulation. China pegged the yuan to the dollar after massively devaluing it in the mid-1990s, then didn't let it begin to rise in value until after 2005, once its boom had taken off. Keeping the redback cheap simultaneously boosted Chinese exports, by making them more affordable to buyers abroad, and discouraged imports, by making them more expensive to Chinese consumers.

It turns out that people don't instantly adjust when their livelihoods are upended, the way they do in textbooks.

But most economists think currency manipulation is, at best, only a partial explanation for China's export explosion. Another answer is that joining the WTO forced the country to reform its economic rules in ways that made its manufacturing sector exponentially more competitive, which quickly unleashed the power of its massive, low-wage labor force. As Autor, Hanson, and Dorn have noted, Beijing shut down turgid state-owned manufacturers, allowing private businesses to take their place. It permitted companies to start exporting directly instead of working through state-owned intermediaries- according to one study, that change alone might have made a 30 percent difference in its exports. By lowering tariffs, the government also made it easier for companies to import the materials they needed to manufacture their goods. In other words, China had more room to grow than anybody imagined, because of how stunted its economy had started out.

"I don't think people were stupid. I was one of those people," Hanson told me, when I asked why he thought so many economists had underestimated China. "We didn't realize how distorted China's economy was."

Clinton's decision to normalize trade relations and welcome China into the WTO may have been like a key in the ignition, encouraging Beijing to become more competitive. But researchers are starting to think it had an important psychological effect on American business executives, too. Justin Pierce of the Federal Reserve Board and Peter Schott at Yale suggest that granting Beijing permanent trade status gave companies the confidence that they could send production offshore, or just start buying goods from Chinese suppliers, without having to worry that Washington might one day impose large tariffs. In other words, it instantly made moving your TV plant to Shenzhen less of a risky bet. In support of this argument, they show that after 2000, American employment generally dropped fastest in the manufacturing industries where tariffs on Chinese goods would have shot up the most had Congress suddenly revoked the country's trading rights. The more the threat of tariffs faded, the more jobs disappeared.

And it turns out that people and communities don't instantly adjust when their livelihoods are upended, the way they do in textbooks. Autor, Dorn, Hanson, et al. found that, when factory jobs disappeared, nothing showed up to replace them. Rather than moving to places with more opportunities, workers tended to stick around their hollowed-out hometowns-after all, uprooting your life for the sake of work isn't that easy for people without much in the way of resources.

It's hard to say exactly what the U.S. should have done differently. What would have happened if Congress had rebuffed Clinton and refused to normalize relations? Maybe Beijing's leaders would have soldiered on and joined the WTO anyway, as many predicted. Or maybe injured national pride would have empowered China's own anti-globalization hard-liners and kept it from acceding or embracing market reforms as ardently as they did-in which case, there's a chance hundreds of millions of Chinese workers would be poorer today, because their country still hadn't opened up to the world. It's also possible that the U.S. trade deficit would have grown even if China hadn't turned into such a manufacturing force, in part because the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency keeps its value high, and because, as a nation, we don't save a lot (which the rules of economics say should lead to a trade deficit). If China had never risen, maybe we'd be angrier today about factories fleeing to Mexico or Vietnam.

It's also possible that mostAmericans have benefited from Chinese trade in the end, thanks to lower consumer prices. Would you even have an iPhone right now without China's low-cost supply chain? Unfortunately, people feel such benefits less acutely than the very concentrated losses in communities where the local economy has been shredded by trade.

The deep pain those cities and towns have experienced is one of the powerful forces that have transformed American politics into a form of tribal warfare over the past decade. Exhibit A is, of course, Donald Trump. It's a mistake to try to pin the Republican nominee's rise on any single factor, whether xenophobia, racism, or economic anxiety. But it's no accident that a candidate who barks about the evils of trade and the need to get tough on China has won the adoration of white working-class men who have watched their hometowns bleed jobs thanks, at least in part, to globalization. Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal found that during the Republican primary, Trump won 89 of the 100 counties that were most exposed to trade with China.

But the political impact of Chinese imports has been wider than just Trump. Academic researchers have found that districts that lose jobs due to trade are more likely to turn against incumbents. Between 2002 and 2010, districts that faced Chinese import competition became far less likely to elect moderate Democrats and far more likely to elect extremely conservative Republicans, including Tea Party members.

Whether or not embracing trade with China was the correct economic decision for the wider country, the people in power simply weren't prepared to help the communities that would suffer the bargain. Their best guesses about the economic impact of normalization bore little relation to what was in store, and little was done for those who got the short end of the bargain, even after it became clear that all was not proceeding as Clinton had hoped. It's become fashionable to say that America needs to do a better job assisting globalization's losers so we can all enjoy its benefits. We don't know how to do that yet, and for a lot of Americans it's too late. Many of them are placing their hopes in Donald Trump-and even if he loses, the rage and disappointment he's capitalized on will remain.

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Bill Clinton's Last Great Victory Is the Reason Hillary Gets Hammered on Trade Today

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On May 24, 2000, Bill Clinton clinched what many believed would be the last great legislative victory of his presidency. That afternoon, the House of Representatives voted to award China permanent normal trade relations, effectively backing Beijing's long-in-the-making bid to join the World Trade Organization.

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The World Trade Organization's main purpose is to insure that trade between nations flows smoothly, predictably and as freely as possible. If the WTO has set out to aid trade what would the cost be for ignoring it's policies and how steep the consequence? I thought this was an excellent conversation piece seeing as how our new president is the person making these claims.

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The Trump administration on Wednesday announced a sharp break from U.S. trade policy, vowing it may ignore certain rulings by the World Trade Organization if those decisions infringe on U.S. sovereignty.

The new trade approach, which was sent to Congress Wednesday, could affect businesses and consumers worldwide, with the White House suggesting the United States could unilaterally impose tariffs against countries it thinks have unfair trade practices - paving the way for a more adversarial relationship with China and other trading partners - and punish companies that relocate overseas and then attempt to sell products on the U.S. market.

"It is time for a more aggressive approach. The Trump Administration will use all possible leverage to encourage other countries to give U.S. producers fair, reciprocal access to their markets," the document said.

The 336-page report included a section entitled "The President's Trade Policy Agenda," which outlined some of the possible breaks from the WTO.

The approach offers President Trump an opportunity to make good on his campaign promises of an "America first" economic nationalism, as he has said U.S. economic policy needs to create new jobs for American workers and prevent companies from moving operations overseas.

To achieve this, Trump vowed during the campaign to either renegotiate or pull back from multinational trade agreements and seek bilateral trade deals, alleging other countries use tariffs and subsidies to disadvantage U.S. companies. He has threatened to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement unless Mexico agrees to renegotiate the deal.

Trump's threatened tariffs and other trade barriers could violate WTO rules and bring blowback from other countries in the trade organization. But the agenda signals the Trump administration could simply ignore those complaints.

Several trade experts said Trump's decision to work outside of the WTO in some cases could create a chain reaction, with countries deciding to impose sanctions and tariffs to help their own businesses and penalize U.S. manufacturers.

If the United States signals it will not comply with WTO decisions, and other countries impose retaliatory penalties against U.S. imports, it could usher in an era of economic protectionism worldwide. Economists and industry groups fear that could trigger a global trade war that could disrupt international business and growth.

"If the Trump administration follows through on the proposals in this document, it would be a body blow to the multinational trade system that the U.S. has helped to build up," said Eswar Prasad, a senior professor of trade policy at Cornell University. "The WTO will lose effectiveness and credibility in trade resolutions if the U.S. decides to walk away."

Wendy Cutler, the former acting deputy for the U.S. trade representative, said the strategy is a substantial departure from past policy - especially with regard to resolving disputes at the WTO. "It seems to be suggesting, with respect to cases taken against the U.S., if we don't like the result, we will go it alone and respond accordingly."

The danger, she said, is that other countries might choose to follow the U.S. approach. "I'm not sure how we can expect other countries to live up to WTO findings if our policy is to just live up to findings that we find acceptable."

The report repeats charges against China that Trump made frequently during his campaign, including accusations that the country manipulates its currency to gain a trade advantage over the United States.

Chinese officials have denied these accusations, and a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment on the White House report.

Among the administration's key objectives, the document lists "resisting efforts by other countries - or Members of international bodies like the World Trade Organization - to advance interpretations that would weaken the right and benefits of, or increase the obligations under, the various trade agreements to which the United States is a party."

Thea Lee, the deputy chief of staff at the AFL-CIO, said labor unions had a mixed view on the administration's new trade posture. "On the one hand, we would agree with certain parts, that our trade policy has not been aggressive or consistent enough in looking out for the interest of American workers," she said. "We would agree we should enforce our trade laws better. We don't necessarily agree that we need to go completely outside the international trade system."

Dave Salmonsen, senior director for congressional relations at American Farm Bureau, said farmers in the United States have always been in favor of the WTO and supported a rules-based system. They understand that trade decisions go each way, "but the stability it brings, selling into a rules-based international system, is good for agricultural exports."

Thomas J. Gibson, president and CEO of the American Iron and Steel Institute, said his group does "appreciate and support the stated objective of strictly enforcing trade laws to prevent dumped and subsidized imports, which have injured the steel industry."

Several other industry groups said Wednesday they were waiting to hear more details from the Trump administration before deciding how the policy would impact them.

The WTO provides a forum for countries to settle trade-related disputes, and the Trump administration has said that the organization's reach hamstrings the ability of the United States and others to respond to unfair trade practices. There are more than 150 countries in the WTO, and they often accuse one another of violating trade agreements. The U.S. has brought more than 100 complaints through the WTO process since 1995, and other countries have filed 129 cases against the U.S.

For example, the WTO sided with the United States in 2014 about duties China had imposed against U.S. automobiles imported into China. China had accused the United States of "dumping" automobiles at unfairly low prices in China, but the WTO panel found that China's dumping accusations were calculated improperly. Separately, India filed a case against the United States over renewable energy subsidies established by a number of U.S. states, including California, Montana and Washington. That dispute is pending.

The new trade agenda document argues that not enough has been done to defend against unfair trade practices, such as dumping, a practice in which companies sell goods abroad at a lower price than their fair value to drive out competitors in a foreign market. The document said that WTO laws are based on the presupposition that countries are free-market economies but many countries around the world unfairly subsidize their products, steal intellectual property, manipulate their currency and carry out other unfair trade practices.

The United States has been a member of the WTO since 1995, although presidents from both parties have objected to certain WTO rulings regarding U.S. trade practices. But none have gone as far as the Trump administration threatened to.

Stan Veuger, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said the administration's plan to continually reevaluate existing trade relationships could end up disrupting American business.

"All those things together create a system where the U.S. government may intervene in arbitrary and unpredictable ways in trade relationships, and I don't think that kind of framework is very helpful for the creation of lasting, worthwhile relationships between firms in the U.S. and firms abroad," he said. "It just makes the business environment more uncertain."

Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said he fears the administration's criticism of WTO rules could end up creating a more lawless global system. "The difficulty is, once we step away from that and say the WTO rules imply a lot more flexibility in what we're allowed to do, we can be 100 percent certain other countries will start to do the same. That's what will ultimately undermine the U.S. system, and there will be big repercussions for U.S. exporters."

The Trump administration has nominated Robert Lighthizer to serve as its U.S. trade representative, but he must first be confirmed by the Senate. Trump has tasked Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to play a lead role in negotiating trade deals, but Lighthizer also is expected to take part, and he has been a longtime critic of China's trade practices.

The White House is required to send an annual trade agenda report to Congress on March 1. The report stipulated that a more comprehensive agenda will be sent to Congress after Lighthizer's Senate confirmation.

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trump trade; wto; china; trade; trade agenda; world trade organization; trump trade agenda

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Trump suggests ignoring World Trade Organization in major policy shift

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The Trump administration on Wednesday announced a sharp break from U.S. trade policy, vowing it may ignore certain rulings by the World Trade Organization if those decisions infringe on U.S. sovereignty.