The WTO’s agreements are the legal foundation for the international trading system that is used by the bulk of the world’s trading nations. This series offers a set of handy reference booklets on selected agreements. Each volume contains the text of one agreement, an explanation designed to help the user understand the text, and in some cases supplementary material. They are intended to be an authoritative aid for understanding the agreements, but because of the legal complexity of the agreements, the introductions cannot be taken as legal interpretations of the agreements.

The agreements were the outcome of the 1986–1994 Uruguay Round of world trade negotiations held under the auspices of what was then the GATT (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade). The full set is available in The Results of the Uruguay Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations: The Legal Texts. It includes about 60 agreements, annexes, decisions and understandings, but not the commitments individual countries made on tariffs and services. A full package of agreements that includes over 20,000 pages of commitments is available from WTO Publications in a 34-volume set, as well as a CD-ROM, The Results of the Uruguay Round.