ORGANIZATION
World Trade Organization (WTO)
The international body established in 1995 to enforce a rules-based global trading system whose rules — written by wealthy nations to constrain the policy options available to developing ones — function as the institutional infrastructure of contemporary ladder-kicking.
The
World Trade Organization, established in 1995 as the successor to GATT, is the international institution that enforces the rules of the global trading system.
Chang's analysis treats the WTO as the institutional embodiment of the contemporary form of ladder-kicking — an organization whose rules were written primarily by the United States, the European Union, and Japan, that enforce policy constraints on developing nations that the wealthy nations themselves never accepted during their own development. The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), drafted largely by American pharmaceutical, software, and entertainment companies, imposed American-style IP protections globally. The Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures restricted the industrial policy tools that developing nations had used successfully. The Agreement on Agriculture permitted wealthy nations to maintain massive agricultural subsidies while requiring developing nations to open their markets to subsidized imports. The institution's rules are formally equal in application but structurally biased in effect — applying