The benefits of an Investment Facilitation for Development Agreement need not wait for ratification by all signatories or approval from all WTO members. Early implementation can be realized through provisions in signatories' GATT and GATS commitment schedules.

By prohibiting subsidies that support illegal, unregulated or unreported fishing activities and contribute to unsustainable depletion of marine resources, the 2022 Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies (AFS) is the first WTO treaty to recognize that a specific trade policy instrument can have adverse...

The WTO dispute settlement system is in crisis, endangering the future of the organization. The proximate reason for alarm is the dwindling number of Appellate Body (AB) members, the result of the United States blocking new appointments as the terms of sitting members expire. The AB crisis...

A significant body of research has sought to examine claims that developing countries are underrepresented as complainants, and/or over-represented as respondents in the WTO dispute settlement system. Most of this literature has focused on their propensity to participate, the idea being that...

March 1995The authors analyze the new Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) that was negotiated between a subset of General Agreement on Tariffs an Trade (GATT) members in the Uruguay Round, focusing especially on the expansion of coverage to services and on the strengthening of enforcement...

In December 2019 the WTO Appellate Body (AB) will cease to operate unless the United States stops blocking new appointments. The US argues the AB has exceeded its mandate and has indicated it wants to ensure that the AB performs the role originally assigned to it in 1995. This paper discusses...

At the recent World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial meeting in Doha, Qatar, WTO members called for the launch of negotiations on disciplines relating to competition based on explicit consensus on modalities to be agreed at the fifth WTO ministerial meeting in 2003. WTO discussions since...

Recent debates on the operation of the WTO’s dispute resolution mechanism have focused primarily on the Appellate Body (AB). We argue that this neglects the first-order issue confronting the rules-based trading system: sustaining the principle of de-politicized conflict resolution that is...