… is from Clark Packard’s and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon’s April 26, 2024, blog post, “The World Trade Organization at Thirty“; on this date 30 years ago – January 1st, 1995 – the World Trade Organization began operating:
[S]ince the WTO’s founding, tariffs and other barriers have fallen substantially—facilitating a more than fivefold increase in global trade between 1994 and 2023. Over the same span, global trade as a share of global GDP has increased from 19.9 to 29.9 percent.
As global trade has increased sharply with more exports from low-and-middle-income countries, global poverty has fallen precipitously. A recent blog post from the WTO’s Secretariat notes that the percentage of global citizens living in poverty fell from 38.1 in 1996 to 10.6 percent in 2022.
