The politics of enforcing GATT/WTO rules

The thesis traces the impact of changes in international institutions on patterns of multilateral trade complaints raised by states in the GATT/WTO system. Once an international trade agreement has been negotiated and ratified, enforcement occurs through a process of discovery of potential treaty violations at the domestic level and subsequent complaint-raising by governments at the international level. In Chapters 2 through 4, I argue that the design of multilateral institutions affects the costs to governments of filing multilateral trade complaints--such as bureaucratic costs, information costs, and opportunity costs--and these costs affect patterns of state-to-state complaints by changing domestic incentives for treaty oversight. Decentralized "fire-alarm" oversight of treaty obligations is expected to dominate when the cost of complaining in the multilateral forum is high, whereas more centralized "police patrol" oversight becomes attractive for states when institutional innovations lower the cost of complaint-raising and create mechanisms for multilateral monitoring. This two-level model accounts for variation in the frequency and distribution of formal complaints observed under the GATT as compared to the WTO, from 1948-1996. It also explains differences in the pattern of formal trade complaints brought to the dispute settlement mechanism, versus informal complaints raised during regular committee meetings of signatories, in case studies of two GATT Tokyo Round Codes from 1990-1993.;In Chapter 5, I examine the effects of European Community institutions on the pattern of GATT/WTO complaints brought against the EC and its member-states. The EC is predicted to affect the ex post operation of the GATT/WTO in three ways: the identity of complainants, the frequency of complaints, and the degree of policy change in the EC subsequent to a negative panel ruling. Import share, preferential status, intergovernmentalist, and legalist frameworks yield competing hypotheses about complaints and are evaluated against the data.;I conclude that the design of multilateral as well as regional institutions has significant and predictable effects on state behavior in the GATT/WTO complaint process. Avenues for future research would include extending the two-level model of complaint-raising to regional trade agreements, as well as other areas of international cooperation, such as environmental regimes.