Russia Wto

USRussia’s entry into the WTO has been a long pending one and it was the only country of the G8 group not to be in the WTO. After around 18 years of negotiation, Russia finally joined WTO as the 156th member in August, 2012. The negotiations began way back soon after the breakup of the Soviet Union in June, 1993 when President Boris Yeltsin submitted the WTO membership application for Russia. During the 1990’s, Russia’s political system was very volatile and had a slow pace reforms which stagnated the WTO negotiations. To overcome this, Vladimir Putin, during his first term as president from 2000 to 2004, implemented the necessary reforms to push for Russia’s accession to WTO. Putin gathered general support by making Russia’s entry into WTO as the theme for all his general meetings. He also set 2003 as the target year for getting into WTO. But his subsequent cutting down on state’s control over energy sectors and inadequate protection of Intellectual property rights was a major setback to Russia’s candidacy. By 2009, Putin had given up hope and decided to apply as a custom union with Belarus and Kazakhstan, but even this agreement back fired due to heavy opposition from WTO. There was also strong resistance against Russia’s entry into WTO from few businessmen and commerce and industry ministry. They commonly felt that, Russia already exports commodities and has good access to the world market but opening up of the market for imports will have a impact on the business of the domestic industries. Yet, the men against Russia’s entry into WTO had no support economically and politically and eventually their resistance had very little impact.
Russia’s new interest in WTO again started because of the intellectual maturity. Economist realized the significance of getting into WTO and hence they made it a state policy. At the same time, structural changes in the economy motivated the businessmen of Russia also to join the economist in need of WTO membership. In June 2010,