Information Technology Agreement
The Information Technology Agreement is a plurilateral agreement enforced by the World Trade Organization and concluded in the Ministerial Declaration on Trade in Information Technology Products in 1996, and entered into force 1 July 1997. Since 1997 a formal Committee under the WTO watches over the following of the Declaration and its Implementations. The agreement was expanded in 2015.
The aim of the treaty is to lower all taxes and tariffs on information technology products by signatories to zero.
According to a 2017 study in the World Trade Review, the 2015 ITA expansion is "the most successful attempt at trade liberalization under the auspices of the WTO since its inception in 1995." The study credits the success of the negotiations to four factors: "a narrower scope without a single undertaking approach, a negotiating group that contained many but not all WTO members, a focus on tariffs rather than non-tariff barriers, and avoiding a nationalistic opposition."
