The Effect of Membership in the GATT/WTO on Trade: Where Do We Stand?

Around four years ago I began to work on the effects of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its predecessor the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).1 I was interested in quantifying the effects of membership in these multilateral trade organizations on international trade. I fully expected to find a large positive effect and was primarily interested in comparing this to the effects of other things that enhanced trade (particularly the effects of currency unions). However, I was astonished to find that a naïve look at the data yielded little evidence that membership of GATT/the WTO had an effect on trade that was either economically or statistically substantive. In this chapter, I review the small literature that has developed around this issue.