Poor countries are rarely challenged in formal WTO trade disputes for failing to live up to commitments, reducing the …. Given the weak incentives to enforce WTO rules and disciplines against small and poor members, bolstering the transparency … function of the WTO is important to make trade agreements more relevant to trade constituencies in developing countries. While …

difficult to pursue the plurilateral route than to negotiate a preferential trade agreement outside the WTO. We argue that this …Plurilateral agreements in the WTO context allow sub-sets of countries to agree to commitments in specific policy areas … that only apply to signatories, and thus allow for ‘variable geometry’ in the WTO. Current WTO rules make it much more …

The National Treatment clause (NT) is the first-line defence in the GATT (and in most other trade agreements) against … internal taxation under the GATT. It is shown that despite severely restricting the freedom to set internal taxes, NT may …. Furthermore, it requires a high degree of economic sophistication on behalf of trade negotiators in order for this beneficial …

We propose a model of trade agreements in which contracting is costly, and as a consequence the optimal agreement may … be incomplete. In spite of its simplicity, the model yields rich predictions on the structure of the optimal trade … explicitly into account can help explain a number of key features of real trade agreements. …

We analyze whether financial compensation is preferable to the current system of dispute settlement in the World Trade … Organization that permits member countries to impose retaliatory tariffs in response to trade violations committed by other members …

theory guides our empirical assessment. We use instrumental variables to estimate the model on trade volume outcomes from WTO …This paper examines implications of the terms-of-trade theory for the determinants of outcomes arising under the … enforcement provisions of international agreements. Like original trade agreement negotiations, we model formal trade dispute …

by Fedon (an Italian producer of eye glass cases) from the EU for the imposition of WTO-authorized retaliatory trade … barriers by the United States following the failure by the EU to comply with an adverse ruling by the WTO regarding its import … WTO-illegal protection, at the expense of a set of EU exporters, including Fedon, that were hit by US countermeasures. By …

to the trade values, market shares, volumes, and prices for those goods that eventually become subject to WTO litigation …This paper introduces a new data set and establishes a set of basic facts and patterns regarding the ‘trade’ that … countries fight about under WTO dispute settlement. It characterizes the scope of products, as well as the levels of and changes …

new World Trade Organization (WTO). Many developing countries perceive the entwining of these social issues with trade …Social policies are likely to have an ever-more prominent role in trade policy discussions in the years ahead for the … unfair, ecologically unsound, and even immoral to trade with countries adopting much lower standards than theirs. This paper …

estimate disaggregate export elasticities and find evidence that countries that are not members of the World Trade Organization … in debates over trade policy, there exists no evidence about whether countries actually apply it when setting tariffs. We …