Increasing moves away from multilateralism have created a fragmented trade and investment scenario where economies progressively combine the application of restrictive unilateral actions with bilateral and regional preferences. The application of, and exceptions to, the non-discrimination...

This issue paper, titled “Legal and Systemic Contested issues in Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) and WTO Rules: Which Way Now?”, and written by Dr Cosmas Milton Obote O’chieng, is a contribution to this process. The paper provides a legal analysis of some systemic issues regarding...

The WTO has not been able to recover since the collapse of the Doha Round in July 2008. Several ministerial conferences including the Buenos Aires meeting in December 2017 failed to reach agreement. The US Trump Administration launched a campaign to reform the WTO in 2018 and 2019. This book...

We examine how theoretical and quantitative economic analysis has and can be used in this stage of the DSU process. First, we identify, characterize, and categorize the major classes of disputes e.g., those affecting import protection versus export promotion and use the Bagwell and Staiger...

Economic theory has made considerable progress in explaining why sovereign countries cooperate in trade. Central to most theories of trade cooperation are issues of self-enforcement: The threat of reprisal by an aggrieved party maintains the initial balance of concessions and prevents...

This paper is a contribution to the literature on rational design of trade agreements. The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an incomplete contract among sovereign states. Incomplete contracts contain gaps. Ex post, contractual gaps may leave gains from trade unrealized; they may create...

This paper constitutes an attempt to reframe and eventually deflate the ongoing “compliance-vs.-rebalancing” debate which has permeated WTO scholarship for the last 10 years. Our main criticism concerns the substance of the entire debate. We find that scholars on both sides of the...

The WTO's Dispute Settlement Mechanism (DSM) has been hailed as a fundamental aspect of the Multilateral Trading System for developing countries. At the same time developing countries face many challenges to ensure their effective participation in the mechanism. This paper presents statistical...

Regional trade agreements (RTAs) have become an indelible feature of the international trading landscape. Most, if not all, RTAs contain provisions that establish procedures for resolving disputes among their signatory members. Yet, the design and functioning of these dispute settlement...

The paper argues that focusing only on disputes formally raised in the WTO Dispute Settlement system underestimates the extent of trade conflict resolution within the WTO. Both the SPS and TBT Committees address a significant number of 'specific trade concerns' 􁈺STCs􁈻 that in the...