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...

We describe recent work on the theory of trade agreements that speaks to the purpose and design of GATT. Our discussion proceeds in three steps. First, we examine the purpose of a trade agreement. In both the traditional economic and the political-economy approaches to the study of trade...

This paper empirically examines recently declassified data from the GATT/WTO on tariff bargaining. We document eight stylized facts about these interconnected high-stakes international negotiations. We use detailed product-level offer and counteroffer data to examine several questions about...

We provide a simple but novel model of trade agreements that highlights the role of transaction costs, renegotiation and dispute settlement. The model allows us to characterize the appropriate remedy for breach and whether the agreement should be structured as a system of "property rights" or...

We discuss China's stance in the WTO post-accession, noting the many issues with implementation of China's accession terms by 2007. We evaluate how much benefit China can realistically receive from WTO membership given current problems with dumping actions against China and trade restrictions...

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...

This paper uses 68 measures of trade policy and trade liberalization to ask if membership in theWorld Trade Organization (WTO) and its predecessor the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) is associated with more liberal trade policy. Almost no measures of trade policy are significantly...