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Towards a more effective World Trade Organization
While the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1994 improved and refined many of the aims of its founding body, GATT or the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, many problems still persist. Professor Kyle Bagwell uses economic analysis and theory to interpret and evaluate the design of the WTO and focuses on improving its rules and practices. With his co-author, Robert Staiger, he has published several papers and written a book entitled The Economics of the World Trading System. In his paper "Will International Rules on Subsidies Disrupt the World Trading System?" he argues that stronger WTO rules governing a country's subsidies which are meant to facilitate multilateral trading may actually undermine it by affecting tariff negotiations. He focuses on one of the main impediments to efficient multilateral trade: the inability of smaller countries to retaliate against bigger ones that may have broken trading rules under a dispute. In "The Case for Auctioning Countermeasures in the WTO" and "The Case for Tradable Remedies in WTO Dispute Settlement" he discusses Mexico's controversial but intriguing new proposal to let smaller countries trade their right of retaliation to another country that might benefit from such an agreement and have the resources to enforce that retaliation.
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