I've been skimming through Chad Bown's new book "Self-Enforcing Trade: Developing Countries and WTO Dispute Settlement." One of his key points is that the Advisory Centre on WTO Law (ACWL) is great at its core mission of offering legal advice to developing countries on the WTO-consistency of government measures. However, there is more to enforcing international trade agreements than good legal analysis. There is also the pre-litigation phase, in which trade barriers are identified and efforts made to convince the government to bring a case; and there is the post-litigation phase, in which WTO rulings are used to pressure the other side to change its policies. On these, the ACWL, for various institutional reasons, cannot be of much help.
So how can we assist developing country exporters on these aspects? Bown proposes an "Institute for Assessing WTO Commitments" (IAWC). As he explains, "[t]he fundamental purpose of the IAWC is to provide a continually updated database of current WTO violations, with special focus on violations of potential interest to exporters in developing countries." The IAWC would not do its own enforcement, but rather would make its information freely accessible for other groups (e.g., law firms, governments) to use. As for how it would operate, he suggests the possibility of an online community of economists, lawyers and political science experts, using a "wiki" framework.
For those who want to hear more about this, check out the upcoming Brookings conference Could the WTO Better Serve the Poor?, where he will be speaking.
What this makes me think of is the issue of developing countries facing conditions for access to GSP programs. They may be able to make a successful legal challenge to the conditions. But could they enforce such a legal victory, that is, could they convince the rich country government to change the policy? My sense is that it could take some very specialized expertise in the "post-litigation" phase to know how to achieve this.
