James Bacchus
James Bacchus
In one more sign of its reckless retreat from responsibility in international trade, the United States is reportedly refusing to pay its agreed share of the budget of the embattled World Trade Organization (WTO). In Geneva, US delegates have evidently told other members of the WTO that its payments for the 2024 and 2025 WTO budgets are on hold pending a review of all US contributions to international organizations.
So far, no one in Geneva is saying much about this latest insult by the Trump administration to trade multilateralism (following Trump’s previous insults and those of Joe Biden for nearly a decade). The 165 other member countries of the WTO are doing their best to pretend the United States is not acting as badly as it is in international trade governance, as they have been doing for some time now. But it is getting harder for them to pretend that all is still well with the rules-based multilateral trading system that the United States played a major role in creating but seems now to be bent on wholly abandoning.
Why would the United States refuse to pay its WTO dues?
The White House has not said.
It is not because the amount of the dues would break the US budget. Overall, the WTO has an annual budget of about $232 million. By longstanding agreement, every year this amount is allocated proportionately among the 166 WTO members according to their share of world trade in the preceding year. Accordingly, the United States is supposed to pay about 11 percent of this WTO budget—about $24 million per year.
This is probably less than US taxpayers fork over to pay for President Trump’s frequent golf trips. Those costs reportedly total tens of millions of dollars. Indeed, one report reckons that Trump’s golfing has already cost the US budget $18 million since he was sworn into his second term as president on January 20. » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/another-misguided-us-attack-world-trade-organization