Almost all WTO dispute panels exceed their statutory time limits. This is often seen to indicate a more general problem for panels to manage their tasks. The time required varies considerably across panels however, suggesting that they do not face the same problems. To shed light on these...

The Dispute Settlement (DS) system is a central feature of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement. This compulsory and binding two-level mechanism for the adjudication of disputes between WTO Members is the most active among international courts. The functioning of the DS system has...

The purpose of this chapter is to report some initial findings based on the WTO Dispute Settlement Data Set (Ver. 2.0) that the authors have compiled for the World Bank. The data set contains approximately 28 000 observations on the workings of the Dispute Settlement system. It covers all 351...

The purpose of this study is to present to readers with limited training in economics the perspective that most international trade economists bring to the study of trade agreements. It focuses on the main approach in the literature, which sees these agreements as means to address negative...

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...