While the WTO now represents most of the world's population, GDP, and trade, the accession process since its founding has been lengthy, and it is getting longer. Compared to its predecessor, the GATT, the WTO applies a much more detailed and legalistic approach to accession, due to its broader scope of policy coverage and the enforcement powers of the Dispute Settlement Understanding. In WTO accession cases, WTO incumbent members have a superior bargaining position. The present study provides evidence that the elapsed time from WTO application to accession has increased with the number of completed accessions, suggesting a process of learning by WTO members to bargain for more demanding concessions from applicants. Regarding the terms of accession, the number of rules commitments has increased, and the level of bound tariffs has fallen, as the number of completed accessions has increased. In view of the difficult cases remaining in order to complete universal WTO membership, the author proposes more flexibility in accession requirements, along the lines of the GATT tradition.

Subsidies to the fishing sector have trade and ecological consequences, especially for fisheries that are over-exploited. In response, WTO members are negotiating to clarify and improve the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures. Yet significant legal challenges constrain this ongoing effort because fisheries conservation and management matters are often addressed by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, instruments of the Food and Agriculture Organization, and other legal regimes to which some WTO members have not consented. This article analyses modes of learning and information exchange within the WTO regime, and compares the proposed use of standards, benchmarks, and peer review in the draft fisheries subsidies rules with existing arrangements between the WTO and organizations such as the OECD and product standard-setting bodies. It argues that novel deliberative strategies of regime interaction are more important in resolving the challenges posed by international law's fragmentation than adherence to strict mandates or legal hierarchies.

Mitigating the impact of the economic crisis will require using all the tools necessary to regain a sustainable path to growth. This includes measures to support trade expansion, including in developing countries, such as those in Africa. This paper provides context for understanding why trade facilitation and lowering trade costs matter to Africa both today and over the long term. Trade costs are higher in Africa than in other regions. Using gravity-model estimates, the authors compute ad-valorem equivalents of improvements in trade indicators for a sample of African countries. The evidence suggests that the gains for African exporters from cutting trade costs half-way to the level of Mauritius has a greater effect on trade flows than a substantial cut in tariff barriers. As an example, improving logistics so that Ethiopia cuts its costs of trading a standardized container of goods half-way to the level in Mauritius would be roughly equivalent to a 7.6% cut in tariffs faced by Ethiopian exporters across all importers.

The July 2008 attempt by a group of ministers to agree on modalities for the WTO's Doha Round broke down in part because they could not agree on a proposed ‘Special Safeguard Mechanism’ (SSM) for developing countries in agriculture. This paper offers a corrective to the conventional story that the breakdown was due to a simple conflict of interests over the SSM between the United States and India. The term SSM was first used in a Doha Round text in 2004, but neither the principles nor the commercial implications had ever been discussed by ministers before July 2008. The conceptual origins of the SSM go back to proposals in the late 1990s for a ‘Development Box’, but by the time of the ministerial, negotiators had been unable to agree on the purpose of the safeguard, or how it would work, including the agricultural products it would cover, how it would be triggered, the remedies (additional tariffs) allowed, or the transparency requirements for its operation. The SSM was therefore one of the least ‘stabilized’ parts of the text placed before ministers in July 2008. Members were far from reaching a consensual understanding of the SSM, which resulted in a fiasco that might have been avoided. Ministers should not have been asked to engage in a poorly prepared discussion of a sensitive issue, because inevitably they staked out incompatible positions. Members may subsequently find it difficult to back down.

Throughout the course of the DSU Review, Members and commentators alike have proposed numerous modifications to the WTO DSU covering a wide range of areas. One area which has received quite a bit of attention is that of retaliatory measures in the implementation phase of the dispute settlement process. This article does not attempt to recap the debate over the appropriateness of trade retaliation or even to discuss all potential amendments targeting this issue. It does, however, identify some of the key criticisms of trade retaliation before analyzing and evaluating the worthiness of trade and/or financial compensation as an alternative. The article finds that neither trade nor financial compensation will do much to resolve the prominent criticisms of trade retaliation while also finding both options would add several uncertainties to the system and, far from increasing compliance with the rulings and recommendations of the DSB, could in fact increase the instances of non-compliance.

This article's subject is the implications that consensus/unanimity and majority voting might have for the World Trade Organization's (WTO) decision-making system. First it looks at some consequences that replacing the consensus rule with majority voting might have for the WTO, including justice concerns, legitimacy, homogeneity of WTO membership, and international enforcement. Second, it summarizes some solutions found in the European Union (EU) for coping with unanimity and majority rule, including constructive abstention, reallocation of contractual responsibilities, and the Luxembourg compromise. Finally, it considers some reform options for the WTO and offers some conclusions, namely expanding majority voting on certain areas only, redefining competences, multi-speed proposals (rethinking the single undertaking, constructive abstention, and the scheduling approach), redefining consensus, combining consensus and majority voting, and issuing interpretations.

This note looks at the WTO rules and procedures applicable to the implementation period of regional trade agreements on trade in goods. In addition, it highlights some differences between law and practice and explores the implications of these divergences. Where the GATT and subsequent instruments draw a distinction between ‘full’ regional trade agreements and ‘interim’ agreements, in practice all agreements are notified as ‘full’ agreements with an implementation period. It analyses the possibility that this deviation from the law, now sanctioned in the 2006 Transparency Decision, might have some practical implications for the regulation of regional trade agreements in the WTO.

This paper examines how to make inferences from econometric models prepared for antidumping, countervailing duty, and safeguard investigations. Analysis of these models has typically entailed drawing inferences from point estimates that are significantly different from zero at a fixed level of confidence. This paper suggests a more flexible approach of drawing inferences using confidence intervals at various significance levels and reporting p-values for the relevant test of injury. Use of confidence intervals and p-values to identify insights and data patterns would have more impact on USITC trade remedy determinations than definitive conclusions about injury based on whether estimates are statistically significant.

Energy has come to the forefront of the public debate in the past decade for two main reasons: the first relates to the lack of a secure, continuous, and unconditional energy supply in the importing countries, mostly developed and transition economies, which are still dependent on non-renewable carbon-based fossil fuels. The second reason is that uncontrolled production, distribution, and use of conventional energy may lead to environmental degradation and global warming. Renewable energy certificates (RECs) are instruments that allow countries to promote energy generation from renewables and form part of domestic policies aimed at climate change mitigation and adaptation. Since RECs can be traded in secondary markets, this paper discusses issues raised by the nature of and the trade in RECs which can be of concern for the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and the multilateral regulation of trade in financial services, notably in the case where World Trade Organisation (WTO) Members undertook sweeping commitments in financial services which equally apply to trade in RECs.

Previous studies of WTO dispute settlement have sought to evaluate whether a Member's legal capacity influences its odds of bringing litigation before the multilateral trade regime. Because direct measures of legal capacity are elusive, these studies have had to use indirect proxies, such as per capita income or number of delegates in Geneva. Yet, the reliability of these measures is questionable. To gauge legal capacity more directly, we surveyed all WTO Members, posing questions concerning their professional staff, bureaucratic organization at home, bureaucratic organization in Geneva, experience handling general WTO matters, and involvement in WTO litigation. Using responses from this survey, we constructed an index of Members' WTO legal capacity that speaks more fully to the challenges of dispute settlement than do commonly used proxies, none of which are strongly correlated with our measure. We supplemented this survey with over three dozen semi-structured interviews with Members' representatives in Geneva, the results of which bear out the importance of properly measuring legal capacity.

This paper discusses the 2005 dispute between the European Community (EC) and the United States (US) regarding the customs classification of two specific products and the ambit of Art. X GATT (Publication and Administration of Trade Regulations). The Dispute Settlement Panel and the Appellate Body (AB) essentially upheld the position advocated by the EC, with one exception that is of no practical import, as the EC had already modified its regime. While the AB followed prior case law, it added two new findings. First, the WTO-consistency of laws can be challenged under Art. X GATT if they concern the implementation or application of laws concerning customs administration and enforcement. Second, the obligation included in Art. X.3(b) GATT to establish tribunals or procedures to review and correct administrative actions relating to customs matters concerns courts of first instance only. Thus it is quite possible that their decisions might not be uniform, and absence of uniformity at this level is not a violation of Art. X.3(b).