On December 15, 1993, 117 countries concluded a major agreement to reduce barriers blocking exports to world markets, to extend coverage and enhance disciplines on critical areas of trade, and to create a more fair, more comprehensive, more effective, and more enforceable set of world trade rules.
The Uruguay Round agreement is the most comprehensive trade agreement in history. The existing set of trade rules was incomplete; it was unreliable; and it was increasingly unresponsive to major concerns of U.S. exporters.
The United States is uniquely positioned to benefit from the Uruguay Round trade agreement and the new world trade system it will create. U.S. workers will gain from significant new employment opportunities and additional high- paying jobs associated with the increased production of goods for export. U.S. companies will gain from significant opportunities to export more agricultural products, manufactured goods, and services. U.S. consumers will gain from greater access to a wider range of lower priced, higher quality goods and services. As a nation, we will compete, and we will prosper. This historic agreement will:
Cut foreign tariffs on manufactured products by over one-third, the largest reduction in history;
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Protect the intellectual property of U.S. entrepreneurs in industries such as pharmaceuticals, entertainment, and software from piracy in world markets;
Ensure open foreign markets for U.S. exporters of services such as accounting, advertising, computer services, tourism, engineering, and construction; greatly expand export opportunities for U.S. agricultural products by limiting the ability of foreign governments to restrict trade through tariffs, quotas, subsidies, and a variety of other domestic policies and regulations; ensure that developing countries follow the same trade rules as developed countries and that there will be no free riders; establish an effective set of rules for the prompt settlement of disputes, thus eliminating shortcomings in the current system that allowed countries to drag out the process and to block judgments they did not like; and create a new World Trade Organization (WTO) to implement the agreements reached.
This agreement will not impair the effective enforcement of U.S. laws; limit the ability of the United States to set its own environmental and health standards and to pass its own laws; or erode the sovereignty of the United States to pass its own laws.