Participation in WTO Dispute Settlement : Complainants, Interested Parties, and Free Riders

By C. Bown. 2005

241 citations recorded by the source corpus.

What affects a country's decision of whether to formally engage in a trade dispute directly related to its exporting interests? This article empirically examines determinants of affected country participation decisions in formal trade litigation arising under the World Trade Organization (WTO) between 1995 and 2000. It investigates determinants of nonparticipation and examines whether the incentives generated by the system's rules and procedures discourage active engagement in dispute settlement by developing country members in particular. Though the size of exports at stake is found to be an important economic determinant affecting the decision to participate in challenges to a WTO-inconsistent policy, the evidence also shows that measures of a country's retaliatory and legal capacity as well as its international political economy relationships matter. These results are consistent with the hypothesis of an implicit 'institutional bias' generated by the system's rules and incentives that particularly affects developing economy participation in dispute settlement.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0a259e1f0510348eb4ede62a1ccfe537a7825e94

Citations in the corpus

• Is the WTO Passé (2015, unknown): “…sample of WTO disputes that concern policies imposed on a national treatment basis in which the policy negatively a¤ected all trading partners Bown (2005b) nds that higher pre-policy levels of bilateral exports of the disputed products are positively associated with potential litigants…”