The WTO Dispute Settlement System 1995–2006: Some Descriptive Statistics

Henrik Horn and Petros C. Mavroidis
Additional contact information
Petros C. Mavroidis: Columbia Law School, New York

No 740, Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics

Abstract: 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 WTO disputes initiated through the official filing of a Request for Consultations from January 1, 1995, until October 25, 2006, and for these disputes it includes events occurring until December 31, 2006. Each dispute is followed through its legal life via the panel stage, the Appellate Body stage, through to the implementation stage. The descriptive statistics in the paper points to three observations. The first and obvious observation is the almost complete absence of least developed countries. Secondly, less poor developing countries are much more active, and much more successful than the authors would have expected. Third, the EU and the US dominate less than expected, being much more often the subject of complaints, than a complaining party, and they have a very low share of all panellists.

Keywords: WTO; Dispute Settlement; Developing Countries (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F13 F53 O19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2008-04-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-reg
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifn.se/Wfiles/Wp/wp740.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:0740

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Research Institute of Industrial Economics Research Institute of Industrial Economics, Box 55665, SE-102 15 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Elisabeth Gustafsson ().