GATT/WTO disputes filed from January 1, 1980 through December 31, 2000. Of these,
154 occurred under WTO rules.
The list of participants includes a wide variety of coun-
tries, with 46 separate complainants (and 43 defendants), of which 31 (21) could be clas-
Our time period begins in 1980 to ensure the comparison across
regimes uses only the mature GATT era as a reference point.
clude WTO cases beginning after 2000 because those 59 subsequent cases have not had
Following Hudec (1993), we only count complaints in which formal GATT/WTO
proceedings were explicitly invoked, i.e., naming defendants and alleging the infringe-
ment of specific legal rights, most often in the form of an initial “request for consulta-
tions.” Since we are interested in characterizing patterns of settlement, and since settle-
ment may occur bilaterally in disputes involving multiple complainants or defendants, for
counting purposes we break multi-state complaints into each constituent pair of com-
plainant and defendant (Horn, Nordström, and Mavroidis 1999, 9; Busch and Reinhardt
2002, 460; Reinhardt forthcoming). We also eliminate redundancy in the list of cases to
3
This list of 154 WTO cases includes five disputes initially filed under GATT but continuing under WTO
procedures. It does not include nineteen GATT cases ending after 1994 without invoking WTO rules.
4
We must emphasize that “developing” countries are not all equally disadvantaged in terms of legal capac-
ity, market power, and general experience in the trade regime. Accordingly, the tests below use a more
refined measure of level of development, i.e., per capita income. However, for the simple purpose of enu-
meration, we group the US, Canada, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, and the EU15 as
“developed,” with the remaining GATT/WTO members (all of which were, for instance, beneficiaries of a
nonreciprocal Enabling Clause preferences scheme such as the Generalized System of Preferences at some
point) as “developing.”
5
The late 1970s began a long period (still underway) of increases in the frequency of disputes (Hudec 1993,
13-14), and the first codification of GATT dispute settlement practices in the 1979 Understanding offers a
useful breakpoint for analysis.
6
Furthermore, our list of 380 cases does not include 43 GATT and 73 WTO complaints begun in our sam-
ple period for which outcome data were unavailable. Many in the WTO subset remain underway as we
write. Nonetheless, our dataset covers 77 percent of the total number of complaints from 1980 through
2000, for 84 percent of those under GATT, and 68 percent of those under the WTO. In future work we will
be able to improve upon at least the latter statistic.
8
Convention