World Trade Organizations Dispute Settlement Mechanism Thesis

World Trade Organizations Dispute Settlement Mechanism - Thesis Example The author of the paper states that the WTO Dispute Settlement Mechanism should secure the ‘rule of law’ within international trade and provide all members with opportunities to exercise their rights equally under multilateral trade agreements. But, even after ten years, there still are many countries which haven't have the option to initiate a dispute. The system has been critically analyzed and the solutions have been proposed that DSM should break the monarchy and fear of developed countries and secure the developing.  An international organization, theWorld Trade Organization(WTO) was designed to supervise and liberalize international was came into being on 1 January 1995. It is the descendant of GATT theGeneral Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which was formed in 1947, and continued to operate for almost five decades as a de facto international organization.  Most of the academic literature, even in its more critical versions, tend to share this basic assumption with the designers of the DSM. The DSM is conceptualized as a legal system where the same rules apply to countries on an equal basis, and where cases are judged according to their merits. This principle is incarnated in the AB, which has developed a case law with this emphasis.  A final set of observations from this literature focuses on biases and inequalities within and between institutions managing trade, including the WTO in general and the DSM in particular (Busch and Reinhardt, 2003; Shaffer, 2003). Here, the main problem identified is that the DSM (and the WTO) has become too technically complex and demanding for most developing countries to use effectively in the absence of adequate assistance. Originally, this is the observation that there are too much law and too little politics in the system.   The implicit biases of systems of trade rules, including the DSM, in favor of powerful countries - reinforced through the dominance of judicial forms of rule-making - have been noted by some contributors to the literature (for example, Busch and Reinhardt, 2001).  Initial studies of developing country participation in WTO dispute settlement found that they were unable to use the system effectively to settle cases, although they had expected levels of success when cases went before panels and the Appellate Body.161 This suggested that there was a need for more training and assistance to developing countries to enable them to handle the initial stages of dispute settlement more effectively. More recent experience suggests that at least the major developing countries - and quite a few Latin American countries in general - have become more effective in using dispute settlement overall, including in using it to obtain early settlements. The establishment of the Advisory Centre on WTO L aw and the dispute settlement training activities of the WTO Secretariat and others should help ensure that developing countries continue to made progress on this front (Busch and Reinhardt, 2001).