I. Introduction
It has long been observed that developing countries made scant use of dispute set-
tlement under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Less clear are the
reasons for this. Most observers insist that the various GATT reforms 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 ques-
tions beg empirical attention. First, have developing countries secured more concessions,
by which we mean favorable trade policy outcomes, in WTO versus GATT dispute set-
tlement? And second, what explains any differences in the outcomes realized by devel-
oping, as opposed to developed countries? As a first cut, most observers note that devel-
oping 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 GATT and, together
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Convention