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Trade openness has long been encouraged as the path to economic development, and many countries have embraced international trade. To deal with the risks of trade conflicts and economic disputes, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) provides a forum for negotiating multilateral trade agreements between nations that aim to remove trade barriers. While most members are developing countries, the benefits of the Dispute Settlement System (DSS) adopted by the WTO to settle trade disputes between members raise concerns about its adequacy for settling disputes involving developing countries. In this work, we look at the effects of trade openness on developing countries' participation as complainants in the WTO DSS. We argue that with more openness of developing countries to external trade, they become less likely to file complaints with the DSS. Using quantitative data, we analyse how trade openness reflects dependence on international trade, dissuading developing countries from using the DSS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement, consistent trade policy rules are established through precedents. This study examines how these precedents are created by citations, including how the kinds of cases involved in previous decisions affect the citation frequency. We investigate three determinants of citation, namely, legal, economic, and political factors. The empirical analysis shows that cases having the following characteristics are more frequently cited: violations of WTO rules found, many claims of WTO rule violations, many third‐party participants, and a heightened capacity of complainant country retaliation. These suggest that the case law on trade policy is not only generated through legal considerations but also reflects economically and politically sensitive cases, which the WTO may tend to follow in line with its previous decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Botswana's Trade Disputes Act was enacted to provide for a settlement of trade disputes by the Commissioner of Labour, mediators and arbitrators and for the establishment of the Industrial Court as a court of law and equity. Mediators therefore play a critical role in the resolution of trade disputes within Botswana's labour law framework, and while their role is facilitative, their contribution to the trajectory of resolving labour disputes is significant. This article analyses the form of mediation envisaged under the act, and the mediator's role and powers. It further considers circumstances under and the extent to which the Industrial Court may intervene in the decisions of mediators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – This article focuses on whether there is a chance to win a World Trade Organization (WTO) trade dispute at the consultation stage. The study suggests an approach to resolving trade disputes on a bilateral level before involving formal WTO resolution procedures. Design/methodology/approach – The model describes the determinants of the probability of winning a trade dispute. The econometric model estimates two different groups of factors available during the consultation period – macroeconomic factors and the institutional features of the trade dispute, such as the number of third parties. The data includes WTO trade disputes from 1995 to 2014. Findings – The suggested model predicts the result of trade disputes with a probability of 76.64%. The research proves that institutional factors such as the number of third parties and the subject of the trade dispute influence the probability of winning. Practical implications – The results of the study help predict the probability of winning a trade dispute at the consultation stage so that countries can decide whether to pursue a trade dispute. Originality/value – The research presents several new hypotheses on the results of trade disputes. The authors show that the higher the number of countries involved, the higher the chance of the complainant winning and that if major parties such as the US or the European Union (EU) are involved as third parties, the chance of the complainant winning increases.

In 2019, the Appellate Body (AB) of the World Trade Organization’s Dispute Settlement System (WTO-DSS) lost its quorum. Instead of the required minimum number of three members, the AB’s membership fell to one member only as the US under Donald Trump blocked the appointment of new members upon the expiry of the terms of two incumbent ones. The AB’s paralysis produced a high level of shock in the EU. In this article, we take a closer look at the US’s decision to paralyze the WTO’s AB and the EU’s reaction to it. Its point is that it will not be easy to get the US back on board as the factors that drove its decision predate the Trump era. Long before Trump, the tradeoff upon which the US based its acceptance of the WTO-DSS unraveled. For US policy makers, the EU is partly to blame for this as it undermined the system’s prompt compliance assumption. More important even is the claim that the system’s AB created new obligations for the WTO members to the point where the acceptance of some WTO rules—notably regarding trade remedies—became politically unsustainable in the US itself.

In 2019, the Appellate Body (AB) of the World Trade Organization’s Dispute Settlement System (WTO‐DSS) lost its quorum. Instead of the required minimum number of three members, the AB’s membership fell to one member only as the US under Donald Trump blocked the appointment of new members upon the expiry of the terms of two incumbent ones. The AB’s paralysis produced a high level of shock in the EU. In this article, we take a closer look at the US’s decision to paralyze the WTO’s AB and the EU’s reaction to it. Its point is that it will not be easy to get the US back on board as the factors that drove its decision predate the Trump era. Long before Trump, the tradeoff upon which the US based its acceptance of the WTO‐DSS unraveled. For US policy makers, the EU is partly to blame for this as it undermined the system’s prompt compli‐ ance assumption. More important even is the claim that the system’s AB created new obligations for the WTO members to the point where the acceptance of some WTO rules—notably regarding trade remedies—became politically unsustainable in the US itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Risk management does not appear explicitly in the SPS Agreement. Support for it appears in the Agreement nonetheless. The Appellate Body has acknowledged that the Agreement does not draw a distinction between assessment and management. Our focus is the assessment and management of risk through interpretation of the expression of the SPS Agreement. The Agreement imposes disciplines on measures implemented for protection of human, animal or plant life and health through the subjectivity of standards. This invites discretionary interpretation and application of policy, particularly with regard to assessment, necessary, and sufficient. Fuzzy logic, rooted in subjectivity and possibility, is particularly suited for analyzing and interpreting standards. It is applied to two manifestations of ambiguity in assessing hazards. One is the level of a risk posing a danger when its level is precisely measured. The other is imprecision in measurement when the level of the hazard that poses a danger is known. Failure to guide interpretation of risk plausibly contributes to disputes over policy. The discussion undertaken by this paper introduces a new means for exporting and importing WTO Members to frame their arguments to one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International trade is an important pillar of the modern economy. Beyond its benefits, the global market generates divergencies among trade partners that can be escalated into trade disputes. Notable interest has arisen in using network analysis to formally describe interactions with concepts derived from the graph theory. As we have noticed a less explored area on the graphical representation of trade dispute data, the purpose of this paper is to build, visualize, and analyze the trade disputes as a weighted network. We use data about trade disputes provided by the Word Trade Organization from 1995 to 31 January 2022 as this is a major regulatory body within the multilateral trading system. Our aim is to address the question on which countries are using the most the dispute settlement mechanism. Based on the association complainant – respondent, we map these interactions to obtain a weighted network that includes 75 countries, 247 unidirectional country pairs and 652 trade disputes. The results indicate the dominance of the United States as the main hub followed by the European Union and a core-periphery structure of the trade dispute network with less participation from smaller countries. Our study is a general assessment of trade disputes which contributes to identifying patterns on the positional changes of countries and their involvement as complainant and respondent respectively in international dispute settlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The trade war has received an enormous amount of attention. Its impacts today have been limited because the U.S. and China have been a bit restrained. Lots of firms [...]

Elizabeth Heath, Wine, Sugar, and the Making of Modern France: Global Economic Crisis and the Racialization of French Citizenship, 1870-1910 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). First published in 2014, a [...]

To correct US current account deficits, dollar depreciation rather than imposition of tariffs is economically the better response. The theory of second best (The Review of Economic Studies, 24, 11) implies that if there is only one distortion then correct it, but the welfare effects of adding a second, supposedly offsetting distortion, may not increase welfare and can reduce it. In the context of an overvalued dollar caused by the dollar's status as the predominant global investment currency—a distortion adversely affecting the US manufacturing sector, the first best policy is not to impose tariffs because this adds a trade distortion on top of an exchange rate distortion and can easily be welfare reducing. US imports may be diverted from China to higher‐cost foreign producers not subjected to the tariff, and tariffs do nothing to promote US exports. The first best policy is directly to reduce the distortion of an overvalued exchange by discouraging excessive accumulation of foreign holdings of US securities held as foreign exchange reserves and by foreign private investors. A tax on the foreign holdings is a way to accomplish this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The trade wars initiated by the Trump Administration in 2018 had an adverse effect on US agriculture. Countertariffs imposed by US trading partners had significant effects on US commodity exports, particularly soybeans, and lowered crop and livestock receipts. To shore up political support from farmers, the Trump administration authorized an estimated total of $28 billion to farmers and ranchers in compensation for export losses. While those payments will help the sector in the short term, the aid payments could well prolong problems for the sector beyond 2020 by exacerbating trade tensions and precipitating future WTO disputes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article investigates the escalation of US-China trade disputes and the implications for Sino-US relations. Both structural realism and liberal institutionalism have failed to pay sufficient attention to the evolution of the US-China economic relationship, and this article strives to highlight this crucial issue. The article employs a historical perspective to examine the transformation of US-China economic relations in the twenty-first century. It argues that the US-China economic relationship is evolving from a symbiotic but asymmetric one between 2001 and 2008, toward an increasingly competitive one after the 2008 global financial crisis, especially in the Trump-Xi era. The changing dynamics of US-China economic relations, as well as the shifting perceptions of the top leadership of each country toward the other, create the impetus for the transformation of Sino-US relations. This article suggests that the recent trade tension is embedded in the growing strategic competition between the two countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeszyty Studenckie Wydzialu Ekonomicznego Uniwersytetu Gdanskiego "Nasze Studia" is the property of Fundacja Rozwoju Uniwersytetu Gdanskiego and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Despite being an economic and military powerhouse, the United States (US) has started seeing itself as a victim of exploitation by other countries, particularly by China, due to its sheer size and the magnitude of its trade with the US. It was under the leadership of the US that the present international economic order was created. This article argues that this order has had pre-existing frictions, which have culminated in this trade war between the US and China. The U.S. arguments of being in a disadvantageous relationship with other countries come across as flawed and misguided when looked at in the light of current economic reality. The reasons behind the mutually harmful nature of this conflict are discussed and potential conciliatory solutions are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]