The Information Technology Agreement (ITA) is a plurilateral agreement enforced by the

World Trade Organization The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an intergovernmental organization that regulates and facilitates international trade. With effective cooperation in the United Nations System, governments use the organization to establish, revise, and ...

(WTO) and concluded in the ''Ministerial Declaration on Trade in Information Technology Products'' in 1996, and entered into force 1 July 1997. Since 1997, a formal Committee under the WTO watches over the following of the Declaration and its Implementations. The agreement was expanded in 2015. The aim of the treaty is to lower all

taxes A tax is a compulsory financial charge or some other type of levy imposed on a taxpayer (an individual or legal entity) by a governmental organization in order to fund government spending and various public expenditures (regional, local, o ...

and

tariffs A tariff is a tax imposed by the government of a country or by a supranational union on imports or exports of goods. Besides being a source of revenue for the government, import duties can also be a form of regulation of foreign trade and po ...

information technology Information technology (IT) is the use of computers to create, process, store, retrieve, and exchange all kinds of Data (computing), data . and information. IT forms part of information and communications technology (ICT). An information te ...

products by signatories to zero. According to a 2017 study in the ''World Trade Review'', the 2015 ITA expansion is "the most successful attempt at trade liberalization under the auspices of the WTO since its inception in 1995." The study credits 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."

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