The Kennedy Round Tariff Negotiations: The Precursors, the Procedures, and the Positive Results

Abstract

When I began research on this paper, my original goal was to determine the effects of the tariff cuts resulting from the Kennedy Round of Tariff negotiations, completed in June, 1967. I soon found many related areas of economics which were both necessary for understanding the field of tariff reduction and interesting to me. So, my paper has used the Kennedy Round as a focal point around which to discuss tariffs. In my paper I include a few basic justifications of freer trade, a history of free trade in the United States, the particular problems preceding the Kennedy Round, and the Kennedy Round itself. I hope to have given a broad picture of the problems in any move toward freer trade, using the Kennedy Round as the most recent and most pertinent move toward freer trade in the postwar period. The Kennedy Round was a meeting of the signers of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade for the purpose of reducing tariffs and other non-tariff barriers to trade. It was held in Geneva from 1962 to the end of June, 1967. The United States was given power to organize and participate in the Kennedy Round through the provisions of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. I hope in this paper to justify tariff cutting as a move toward free trade and progress from the Trade Expansion Act to the Kennedy Round and the results of the Kennedy Round. I have attempted to make most of this paper understandable to the average undergraduate, but am afraid I may have included too many ideas to make this possible.