Signed | 13 December 1996 |
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Effective | 1 July 1997 |
Depositary | World Trade Organization |
The Information Technology Agreement (ITA) is a plurilateral agreement enforced by the World Trade Organization (WTO) 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.[2] The agreement was expanded in 2015.[3]
The aim of the treaty is to lower all taxes and tariffs on information technology products by signatories to zero.[2]
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."[3] 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."[3]