Fifty Years Later - WHAT HATH GATT WROUGHT?
The General Agreement on Tariffs
and Trade (GATT) governs how entities may trade and how nations may protect. The
fiftieth anniversary of the founding of GATT offered an opportunity to step back and
reexamine its record and potential. Together with the Brookings/George Mason
Roundtable on Trade and Investment and the Congressional Institute for the Future, George
Mason University's Institute of Public Policy assembled a high-powered mix of legislators,
executive branch trade officials, academics, journalists, and others with an interest and
expertise on GATT, the WTO, and global trade. The conference was organized by Dr. Susan Aaronson.
SUSAN ARIEL AARONSON is an economic historian whose research focuses on how the public understands economic change and the role of the federal government in the economy. She is currently writing a book for Hopkins press , funded by the Ford Foundation, on protectionism as a social movement and a global movement. Her teaching interests are in U.S. trade policy; history of public policy; business/government relations; and comparative economic systems. Aaronson is the author of many articles and op eds on trade. She has written a history of the ITO, GATT, and the WTO called Trade and the American Dream. She has also written two primers on trade and democracy: Are there Trade Offs when Americans Trade and Trade is Everybody's Business.
She is a monthly commentator on PRI's "Marketplace." She is on the faculty of George Mason University's Institute of Public Policy.