The Domestic Political-Economy of the WTO Crisis: Lessons for Preserving Multilateralism

T. Renee Bowen and J. Lawrence Broz

No 27914, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: A major contributor to the crisis at the World Trade Organization (WTO) is the decline in support for multilateralism in the United States. Three key problems with WTO design precipitated the decline. First, incomplete rules related to trade remedies are interpreted by the WTO’s Appellate Body (AB) in ways that conflict with a narrow set of sensitive US domestic priorities. Second, existing WTO rules do not sufficiently account for non-market economies, such as China. Third, remediation of these problems is infeasible due to consensus-based decision-making in the WTO. These problems represent more fundamental challenges induced by increased economic integration—loss of sovereignty and erosion of democracy. To alleviate these problems in multilateral agreements we suggest: 1) a narrow solution that carves out a special process for handling trade remedy disputes; 2) a broad solution that relaxes the requirement of consensus for WTO reform, adopting some form of supermajority voting or a sunset clause; 3) the reform of domestic consensus-building institutions within the US that directly address the political-economy sources of voter discontent.

JEL-codes: A11 F02 F13 F5 F51 F52 F53 F55 F6 H1 H4 K12 K33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int
Note: IFM ITI LE POL
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published as T. Renee Bowen & J. Lawrence Broz, 2022. "The Domestic Political Economy of the WTO Crisis: Lessons for Preserving Multilateralism," Global Perspectives, vol 3(1).

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27914.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:nbr:nberwo:27914

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27914

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().