Academic Paper from the year 2020 in the subject Economics - Foreign Trade Theory, Trade Policy, , language: English, abstract: This paper examines the definition, history and status of free trade in the world today. In history a lot of countries acted in accordance with protectionist trade policies which means they had a lot of barriers, tariffs, and limits towards the trade with other countries. The aim was to protect their own economy. However, in today's world there is much more free trade which means "the buying and selling of goods, without limits on the amount of goods that one country can sell to another and without special taxes on the goods bought from a foreign country". The theory of free trade was first invented in 1776 by Adam Smith. And although it goes back to colonial times, free trade remained a theory for centuries. Ever since Adam Smith's concept of free trade, merchants tried to remove trade barriers between countries again and again. But especially during the industrialization period the countries used trade barriers to boost their economy. As late as after the second world war, the US for example started to lower import tariffs. The idea of lowering tariffs is that more trade takes place, countries can specialize economically in what they do best and afterwards exchange these products for goods that they don't produce most efficiently or that they don't have easily available. That in turn means the people are freer to choose their position in the economy, the worlds resources are used more efficient and the wealth of nations is growing. In a nutshell it means a country can compete in the global market by specializing to its fundamental economic strengths and by doing this increase economic growth. Some international institutions such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) were founded to promote free trade in place of protectionism and so helped to build the world how it is today in terms of trading.