Abstract. The world financial and economic crisis has clearly demonstrated that the current principles and rules of the international trade were able to hold governments of most states off the impetuous protectionism, which allowed to insure the world economy against a deeper recession. However, the crisis has also depicted the importance of further international trade system improvement. In the article, the directions of working out of new agreements on future tariff and non-tariff barriers in international trade and actions encouraging its development are considered. At the same time, as accentuated in the paper, it is undeniable that there are flaws in the WTO activities, mainly the vivid bias to serving the interests of the most developed countries, which reasonably draws attention of many researchers-economists.