Prospective Implications of Turkey's Trade Safeguard Measures and Compliance to WTO's Trade Norms

Prospective Implications of Turkey's Trade Safeguard Measures and Compliance to WTO's Trade Norms

International trade can be defined as the exchange of products and services that are transferred among individuals and businesses in different countries. It can also be defined as a specific transaction conducted by a multinational corporation (MNC) or international business company in business among different countries.

Most observers strongly believe that the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), play an important role in promoting the world trading system. It is stated that under administration of the GATT/WTO since 1948 world trade has been growing fast. Merchandise exports grew by 6 percent annually. Total trade in 1997 was 14-times the level of 19501. Since 1965 world trade has grown faster than world income. Therefore, it is expected the GATT/WTO has helped to create a favorable trading system to foster bilateral and multilateral trade in the world.

However, Birbeck et al. (2009) shows that GATT and WTO countries have similar patterns of trade than countries that are not a part of these organizations; the GATT/WTO has not made a significant role to encourage trade. It is really a surprising finding since tariff barriers in developed and developing WTO members have been removed substantially through GATT/WTO multilateral and bilateral trade negotiation rounds.

Safeguard Measures

The term "safeguards" in GATT \ WTO is generally used to denote obligation-avoiding actions of a member government responding to a contingent surge of imports that are deemed to injure or threaten to injure seriously the domestic industries of a product. Safeguard regime plays a key role in stabilizing multilateral trade system; therefore, it is reputed as “safe value”. Consequently, safeguard mechanism are given more importance by WTO members as a kind of powerful trade instruments, which contribute to relieve industrial injuries and equipoise trade interests. Trade safeguard measures are critical of a regime of exceptions in the WTO legal rules, which means that when goods are imported, the rapid growth of the importing country related industries cause serious damage or threat to the importing country import restrictions. This measure is to avoid international trade "gray area measures" to developing countries politically passive, while reflecting the WTO fair, transparent principles accepted by the international community a legitimate means of trade safeguard measures. In the WTO multilateral trading system, safeguards mechanisms are regarded as having a "safety valve" effect.

It has been seen that the national debate on trade issues often ignores these important benefits. Further, policy is the state to cancel the import and export restrictions on goods and services and barriers, the removal of domestic importers and exporters of all kinds of privileges and benefits to the domestic market for free competition.

It should be noted that, appropriate protection is needed by countries for their industries; however, the task is arduous and complex. If there is a systematic project, then the development of several laws or regulations can be effectively ...