The Information Technology Agreement (ITA) is a plurilateral agreement enforced by the

World Trade Organization The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an intergovernmental organization headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland that regulates and facilitates international trade. Governments use the organization to establish, revise, and enforce the rules that g ...

(WTO) and concluded at the WTO's Singapore Ministerial Conference in 1996. The agreement was set out in the ''Ministerial Declaration on Trade in Information Technology Products'' issued at the conference, and entered into force 1 July 1997. The declaration referred to "the key role of trade in information technology products in the development of information industries and in the dynamic expansion of the

world economy The world economy or global economy is the economy of all humans in the world, referring to the global economic system, which includes all economic activities conducted both within and between nations, including production (economics), producti ...

".World Trade Organization
Ministerial Declaration on Trade in Information Technology Products (Singapore, 13 December 1996)
accessed 29 January 2024 Since 1997, a formal Committee under the WTO watches over the following of the Declaration and its Implementations. The aim of the treaty is to lower all

taxes A tax is a mandatory financial charge or levy imposed on an individual or legal entity by a governmental organization to support government spending and public expenditures collectively or to regulate and reduce negative externalities. Tax co ...

and tariffs on

information technology Information technology (IT) is a set of related fields within information and communications technology (ICT), that encompass computer systems, software, programming languages, data processing, data and information processing, and storage. Inf ...

products by signatories to zero. The agreement was expanded at the Nairobi Ministerial Conference in 2015. According to a 2017 study in the ''World Trade Review'', the 2015 ITA expansion was "the most successful attempt at trade liberalization under the auspices of the WTO since its inception in 1995". The study attributes 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".

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