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Abstract
The dismantling of trade barriers among the industrial countries in the 1950s and 1960s contributed to a period of unprecedented world economic growth (Chart 23). In the 1970s and the 1980s, an increasing number of developing countries adopted outward-looking trade policies as part of a strategy of structural economic reform. Those countries that have succeeded in implementing these reforms have experienced a significant and durable improvement in economic performance. Most recently, the countries in transition in central Europe have liberalized their previously distorted trading regimes as an essential element of the process of transformation to market-based economies, and some progress has been made in several countries of the former Soviet Union. Trade in both industrial and developing countries has tended to become more regionalized, in part because of regional trade arrangements, which are discussed in detail in Annex III.
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