The U.S. vs the WTO
At issue:
The factor precipitating this crisis is the US claim that the WTO Appellate Body, the top body that hears appeals and rules on trade disputes, has abused its authority by issuing expansive interpretations of WTO provisions while reviewing rulings by WTO dispute resolution panels—what trade lawyers call “judicial overreach.”
Jeffrey J. Schott suggests a possible solution: A permanent moratorium on appeals involving antidumping (AD) and countervailing duty (CVD) cases. These cases should still be subject to binding dispute panel decisions, but by curving out AD/CVD from Appellate Body review, would provide a concrete concession by WTO members to address the predominant US concern about judicial overreach.
The WTO’s Existential Crisis: How to Salvage Its Ability to Settle Trade Disputes
By: Jeffrey J. Schott, Euijin Jung – Peterson Institute
Did the WTO benefit trade?
Larch and al. use a structural gravity model which includes intra-national trade in addition to international trade flows. They find that GATT/WTO membership has increased trade between Members by 171% and trade between member and non-member countries by about 88%.
Trade effects of WTO: They’re real and they’re spectacular
By: Mario Larch, José-Antonio Monteiro, Roberta Piermartini, Yoto Yotov – University of Bayreuth, WTO, Drexel University
In the 70’s there was the U.S.-Japan trade war. Are there any similarities with the situation now?
Jürgen Kurtz compares today’s U.S.-China trade war to the U.S.-Japan trade conflict of the 1970s (in a period that both preceded and tracked the Uruguay Round negotiations): when the rise of Japan as an economic competitor to the U.S. triggered a shift in unilateral and multilateral strategies employed by the U.S. to manage the trade conflict. Similarly to today, the U.S. had become concerned about decreasing benefits from the GATT in light of the economic resurgence of Western Europe and Japan and the concomitant erosion of American comparative advantage in some mass production and technology intensive sectors. The final Uruguay Round package that led to the WTO contained both substantive promises vital to the U.S. (such as on intellectual property rule and services trade) but also accompanying limits on power. So the key question now is what kind of changes in the WTO would persuade the U.S. to abandon unilateralism?
Past as Prologue? Historical Patterns and Discontinuities in Modern Trade Wars
Author: Jürgen Kurtz
From: European University Institute
