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37 J. World Trade 719 (2003)
Developing Countries and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organization Dispute Settlement

handle is hein.kluwer/jwt0037 and id is 729 raw text is: Journal of World Trade 37(4): 719-735, 2003. © 2003 Kluwer Law International. PNnted in The Netherlands. Developing Countries and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organization Dispute Settlement Marc L. BUSCH* and Eric R.EINHARDT** I. INTRODUCTION It has long been observed that developing countries made scant use of dispute settlement under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Less clear are the reasons for this. Most observers insist that the various GATT reforms that were intended to help developing countries failed to insulate them from the power politics of the system (Kuruvila, 1997). Not surprisingly, many of these same observers predict that the greater legalism of the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU), in particular, will encourage more participation by developing countries. Indeed, some go so far as to suggest that, enticed by a system in which, unlike in the GATT years, right perseveres over might (Lacarte-Muro and Gappah, 2000, 401), developing countries will have greater recourse to multilateral dispute settlement. The underlying presumption, of course, is that developing countries were especially ill-served by GATT's diplomacy, and are better poised to benefit from the WTO's more legalistic architecture. We argue that this conventional wisdom is wrong on both counts. In assessing how developing countries have fared in dispute settlement, two questions beg empirical attention. First, have developing countries secured more concessions, by which we mean favourable trade policy outcomes, in WTO versus GATT dispute settlement? And second, what explains any differences in the outcomes realized by developing, as opposed to developed countries? Most observers note that developing countries have, in fact, been more active in WTO dispute settlement. This greater participation is typically traced to the legal reforms ushered in by the DSU- notably the right to a Panel and automatic adoption of Panel reports. The argument is that these reforms have done much to temper the power politics that permeated the * Associate Professor, Queen's School of Business, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. E-mail <m.busch@business.queensu.ca>. ** Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, United States. E-mail: <erein@emory.edu>. For comments, we thank Karen Alter, Howard Chang, Bill Davey, Andrew Guzman, Rob Howse, Petros C. Mavroidis, Beth Simmons, Richard Steinberg, and seminar participants at the Advisory Centre on WTO Law, Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law, and the Swedish International Development Agency. We also thank Alex Muggah for research assistance. We owe a great debt to Bob Hudec, whose work inspires our own, and who was a gracious mentor and colleague. Busch thanks the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research for financial support; Eric Reinhardt thanks the University Research Committee of Emory University. Copyright 0 2007 by Kluwer Law International. All rights reserved. No claim asserted to original government works.

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