The subject of this paper is Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 of the United States, a statute that for the past 35 years has allowed the U.S. to unilaterally handle its trade disputes. More specifically, the paper examines the constraining and supporting effects of the multilateral trading...

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...

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 'regret'...

This paper surveys the law and economics literature on WTO dispute settlement. As a background, we first briefly lay out main features of the legal framework, and discuss possible roles of a dispute settlement mechanism. We then discuss the two main themes in the empirical literature on dispute...

The purpose of this paper is to report some initial findings based on the WTO Dispute Settlement Data Set (Ver. 2.0) that the authors have compiled for the World Bank. The data set contains approximately 28 000 observations on the workings of the Dispute Settlement (DS) system. It covers all 351...

The National Treatment clause (NT) is the first-line defense in the GATT (and in most other trade agreements) against opportunistic exploitation of the inevitable incompleteness of the agreement. This paper examines the role of NT as it applies to internal taxation under the GATT. It is shown...

It has been alleged since its inception that the WTO Dispute Settlement (DS) mechanism is biased against developing countries, as manifested in e.g. allegedly too low rates of dispute initiation. To shed light on this issue, this study analyses the determinants of developing country...

A significant body of research has sought to examine claims that developing countries are under-represented as complainants, and/or over-represented as respondents in the WTO dispute settlement system. Most of this literature has focused on their propensity to participate, the idea being that...

The Dispute Settlement (DS) system is a central feature of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement. This compulsory and binding two-level mechanism for the adjudication of disputes between WTO Members is the most active among international courts. The functioning of the DS system has...