Information Technology Agreement

The Information Technology Agreement (ITA) is a plurilateral agreement enforced by the World Trade Organization (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".

[3] The aim of the treaty is to lower all taxes and tariffs on information technology products by signatories to zero.

[4] 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".