The article raises the question of the role of Global economic regulation institutions, in particular, the WTO after the Covid-19 pandemic. The author considers the aggravated modern problems of the WTO, and focuses on the crisis of the Organization that arose in December 2019 in connection with the suspension of the appellate body functioning in the WTO dispute settlement system. The author also tries to identify new challenges of the XXI century for the Global economy, regulatory institutions, as well as for Russia.
This article asks why the dispute settlement provisions of the multilateral trading system underwent significant reforms during the negotiations that led to the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995. Why did the leading trading powers accept a highly legalized system that departed from established political–diplomatic forms of settling disputes? The contribution of this article is threefold. First, it complements existing accounts that exclusively focus on the United States with a novel explanation that takes account of contextual factors. Second, it offers an in-depth empirical case study based on interviews with negotiators who were involved and novel archival evidence on the creation of the new WTO dispute settlement system. Third, by unpacking the long-standing puzzle of why states designed a highly legalized system, it addresses selected blind spots of the legalization and the rational design literatures with the aim of providing a better understanding about potential paths leading toward significant changes in legalization.
The Effectiveness of the WTO Dispute Settlement System: A Statistical Analysis