The always insightful Alan Wolff was talking about The Future of the WTO at the Peterson Institute today. The whole thing is worth a listen, but I wanted to highlight his response to my question on the Appellate Body crisis during the Q & A:
Adam Posen:
Simon Lester asks, do you think the Biden administration will make a concrete proposal for Appellate Body reform that can save us from appeals "into the void" and unlock the process? What he's really interested in is, what you think a Biden administration will do to actively engage on this issue.
Alan Wolff:
I think that there will be, and I'm not in the administration, so I can't speak for them, but I think there will be a willingness to negotiate, which has not existed in the same way in the prior administration. So that opens up possibilities. Will they table something as a proposal? I wouldn't expect that. But they could.
The European Union, in a proposal that I didn't embrace at all immediately, has an alternative dispute settlement mechanism, the multilateral MPIA, the multi party interim agreement, that has some elements that are interesting and worth following up on, like, there are 10 Appellate Body members in their system. If you enlarge that number, you can get members who know what a trade remedy is, who can administer trade remedies; you can get diversity of interests, those who care about small business, those who care about developing countries.
Developing countries currently say, this is not an issue for us, we can't afford to bring disputes, they're too lengthy, they're too costly. So, all this discussion about dispute settlement just leaves us cold, it's just not relevant to us.
Can you change that dynamic? Yes. So does the US table some omnibus proposal? I doubt it. But is it willing to sit down and listen to others' proposals, and table some of its own in the course of negotiations? I think that process can and should and will begin this year, at the end of this year probably.
