The creation of the Appellate Body (AB) of the WTO entails an unprecedented delegation of power to an international adjudicator, since the WTO requires states to ensure compliance of their domestic regulations with the sweeping obligations in WTO agreements. This is legitimized in some academic analysis and much political rhetoric in terms of the rule of law, suggesting that the role of the adj...

The effect of courts arises through process and precedent. First, the process of selecting cases to escalate in the legal venue reveals information about the preferences of defendant and complainant. A third party arbitrator and multilateral membership adds international obligation and reputation as new leverage for compliance. Second, a formal dispute mechanism may have broader impact if the a...

BACKGROUND Trade liberalization is promoted by the World Trade Organization (WTO) through a complex architecture of binding trade agreements. This type of trade, however, has the potential to modify the upstream and proximate determinants of tuberculosis (TB) infection. We aimed to analyse the association between trade liberalization and TB incidence in 22 high-burden TB countries between 1990 ...

The relation between the climate regulation and the multilateral trade regime is a rising issue in the field of international governance. This article presents the options available to OPEC economies related to this. It analyses the option of introducing a carbon tax or border adjustment measures in the core of the WTO regime. It demonstrates that this option is not sustainable for both institu...

Many fear China’s accession to WTO will impoverish its rural people, via greater import competition in its agricultural markets. We explore that possibility bearing in mind that, even if producer prices of some (land-intensive) farm products fall, prices of other (labor-intensive) farm products could rise. Also, the removal of restrictions on exports of textiles and clothing could boost town an...

Countries have long used import tari↵s as an instrument to stimulate or protect downstream industries; however, in the GATT/WTO era, tari↵s have fallen greatly worldwide. Has the WTO succeeded in limiting the prevalence of this class of industrial policy, or are governments still attempting to move downstream via other policy instruments? For countries with large raw materials endowments, one a...

In this Essay, I would like to focus simply on some key points which I believe are central to the WTO’s present, and also to its future. This Essay begins by discussing the importance of the rule of law to the WTOs work. Part II talks about changes that have come with an expanding membership. Part III concludes with a review of recent events and an optimistic outlook for the WTO.

This paper examines how interest group pressure influences the choice of trade negotiation strategies. Political economy studies have largely focused on explanations of protectionism, and export promotion has received less attention. Similarly, institutional studies give more attention to why states choose to violate or comply with international rules, without examining the decision by states t...

Much of the literature on the design of trade policy institutions takes the political pressure that governments face as exogenous. This paper integrates exogenous and endogenous political pressure into a single model, showing that the presence of endogenous political pressure overturns important results and provides insight into observed features of trade agreements as well as rules of organiza...

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) on services have proliferated since 2000. This working paper briefly presents the expansion of the dataset initially developed in Marchetti and Roy (2008). The data permits to assess the extent to which market access commitments undertaken by WTO Members in PTAs go beyond GATS commitments and offers made in the context of the Doha Development Agenda. The dat...