Until the beginning of this century, the GATT/WTO system worked. Economic research provided a compelling explanation. It showed that if governments maximize the well-being of their own countries broadly defined, GATT/WTO principles would facilitate mutually beneficial cooperation over their...

We consider the design and implementation of international trade agreements when: (i) negotiations are undertaken and commitments made in the presence of uncertainty about future political pressures; (ii) governments possess private information about political pressures at the time that the...

International disputes over subsidies are increasingly disrupting the world trading system. The creation of the WTO was nearly prevented by disputes in the Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations over the issue of negotiating disciplines on agricultural subsidies, an issue which continues to plague...

East Asian countries have become much more active in utilizing the WTO dispute settlement system to assert their legal rights. The dispute settlement experience so far for these countries has shown strong tendency of domestic governments to defend economic interest of major industries. Their...

This paper documents and assesses the significance of the policy changes in China that WTO accession implies in 3 key service categories (banking, insurance, and telecoms), asking whether it is likely they will really be fully implemented in their entirety as undertaken at signature in 2002....

A prominent problem with the WTO dispute settlement procedures is the practical difficulty faced by small and developing countries in finding the capacity to effectively retaliate against trading partners that are in violation of their WTO commitments. In light of this problem, Mexico has...

U.S. safeguard actions have run into problems with the WTO's Panel and Appellate Body reviews for failing to ensure that injury caused by non-import factors is not attributed to imports. This paper reviews the subtle legal and economic differences between U.S. trade law (Section 201) and the...

What does economics have to say about the design of international trade agreements? We review a literature on this question, providing detailed coverage on three key design features of the GATT/WTO: reciprocity, nondiscrimination as embodied in the MFN principle, and tariff bindings and binding...

How high were import tariffs when GATT participants began negotiations to reduce them in 1947? Establishing this starting point is key to determining how successful the GATT has been in bringing down trade barriers. If the average tariff level was about 40 percent, as commonly reported, the...

The majority of the world's countries have antidumping (AD) statutes in place, hundreds of AD actions occur annually across these countries, and AD criteria and procedures have been codified in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and its successor, the World Trade Organization. AD's...