On the Economic Success of GATT/WTO Dispute Settlement

Chad Bown

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2004, vol. 86, issue 3, 811-823

Abstract: What features of the dispute settlement process help governments live up to their trade liberalization commitments? Exploiting data on GATT/WTO trade disputes initiated and completed between 1973 and 1998, this paper identifies economic and institutional determinants that help defendant governments commit to liberalizing trade. We find substantial evidence consistent with the theory that power measures, including threat of retaliation by the plaintiff, yield credibility to allow defendant governments to live up to their commitments. We find only limited evidence, however, that particular procedural or institutional features beyond the basic GATT/WTO dispute settlement forum itself contributed to the successful economic resolution of trade disputes. © 2004 President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2004
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (49)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/0034653041811680 link to full text (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:tpr:restat:v:86:y:2004:i:3:p:811-823

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().