settlement procedures of the WTO, the European Union, NAFTA, and other regional trading agreements.

Politicians in national legislatures, goaded on by lobbyists, often threaten to pass bills that will “establish a fair

playing field” or “prevent unfair trade”—although most such bills seek to accomplish these high-sounding

goals by placing more restrictions on trade. Protesters in the streets may object to specific trade rules or to the

entire practice of international trade.

Through all the controversy, the general trend in the last 60 years is clearly toward lower barriers to trade. The

average level of tariffs on imported products charged by industrialized countries was 40% in 1946. By 1990,

after decades of GATT negotiations, it was down to less than 5%. One of the reasons that GATT negotiations

shifted from focusing on tariff reduction in the early rounds to a broader agenda was that tariffs had been
{"uploaded_via": "batch_uploader", "creationdate": "2022-12-07T14:15:44-06:00", "source_file": "downloads\\business\\economics\\Microeconomics3e.pdf", "upload_timestamp": "2026-02-07T15:37:44.339247", "batch_upload": true, "title": "Principles of Microeconomics 3e", "moddate": "2022-12-07T14:23:05-06:00", "creator": "PDFMiner", "producer": "Prince 14.2 (www.princexml.com)", "file_type": ".pdf", "file_name": "Microeconomics3e.pdf", "source": "downloads\\business\\economics\\Microeconomics3e.pdf", "file_size_mb": 26.99, "total_pages": 597, "file_hash": "830b81f41611ac67a490444dbb5d6aed292224606965b06965b914443c93331a"}