"The failure to conclude the Doha Round isn't the only drain on the credibility of the WTO and the rules-based trading system. Poor choices of dispute settlement cases are too. It appears that some are so besotted with the "power" of multilateral trade rules that they actually believe that governments will be cowed sufficiently by losing WTO disputes that they will bring themselves back into compliance with those rules. The threat of sanctions may affect the incentives to come back into compliance, but that is no guarantee that compliance will occur. In some disputes the commercial interests at stake are so big that compliance is unlikely and the magnitude of sanctions so large that their imposition would significantly disrupt the trade."
Stephen Kinsella
Economist at the University of Limerick
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