GENEVA (EFE) .- Fifty countries have reached an agreement whereby they completely eliminate tariffs on up to two hundred high-tech products worth over a billion dollars, he announced the World Trade Organisation ( WTO).
This is the first time this century that an agreement to cut rates is reached, and even if signed only a third of the 162 WTO members, they represent the major economies, since it subscribe the European Union, the United States and China, among others.
In addition, countries participating in this agreement are responsible for 97 percent of world trade on high-tech products.
The high-tech trade is comparable to the annual global trade in iron, steel, and textiles combined, or car.
The pact sealed updates the Agreement on Information Technology (ITA, in their acronym) signed in 1997 and will imply that rates worth more than a billion dollars will be cut.
The 200 products ranging from video games to medical equipment such as MRI machines, through cartridges GPS devices or printers.
Negotiations began in 2012 and finally concluded this week.
It was envisaged that the WTO director general Roberto Azevedo, gave a press conference about it but it was canceled at the last moment.
“eliminating tariffs on trade of this magnitude will have an impact. Help lower prices, to create jobs and boost global GDP “Azevedo said, quoted in a statement.
The 54 countries that have reached the agreement will now have four months to negotiate the details of same and to present its implementation at the ministerial conference in Nairobi in December.
According to the agreement, most tariffs will be eliminated over the next three years, from 2016.
This sectoral agreement is reached while treaties are being negotiated regional or multi-regional free trade, while the Doha Development Round, the process of trade liberalization that covers all WTO members still advance . after seven years of paralysis
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