In the first dispute on renewable energy to come to WTO dispute settlement, the domestic content requirement of Ontario's feed-in tariff was challenged as a discriminatory investment-related measure and as a prohibited import substitution subsidy. The Panel and Appellate Body agreed that Canada was violating the GATT and the TRIMS Agreement. But the SCM Article 3 claim by Japan and the European Union remains unadjudicated, because neither tribunal made a finding that the price guaranteed for electricity from renewable sources constitutes a ‘benefit’ pursuant to the SCM Agreement. Although the Appellate Body provides useful guidance to future Panels on how the existence of a benefit could be calculated, the most noteworthy aspect of the new jurisprudence is the Appellate Body's reasoning that delineating the proper market for ‘benefit’ analysis entails respect for the policy choices made by a government. Thus, in this dispute, the proper market is electricity produced only from wind and solar energy.

This article discusses the future of benchmarking after the Canada–Renewable Energy/FIT case. This decision left us with bad law. Assuming that any momentous shift, especially in the current regulatory framework that does not provide for any express justification for good subsidies, is difficult, we speculate on what may lie ahead for future litigants and the dispute settlement. Either ‘a wide’ or ‘a narrow road’ can now be followed. After outlining the risks that a normalization and expansion of this ruling may pose (the ‘wide road’), we have responded to the call for clarification and narrowing of this case (the ‘narrow road’) and speculated on how this could be done. The EU Altmark decision of the European Court of Justice, which was certainly on the minds of the EU litigators and whose ethos the Appellate Body embraced by referring to the use of ‘price-discovery mechanisms’, has inspired the analysis. The exercise has, however, exposed many challenges and difficulties, many of them having already occurred in EU law. The amount of helpful clarification the WTO judicature could offer is thus limited, and would probably be restricted to taking the link between market definition and benchmarking seriously. This unsatisfactory conclusion leads to suggest, once again, law reform as the only solution to the current status quo.

This article examines the relationship between antidumping duties and strategic industrial policy. We argue that the dynamic between the two instruments is more complex and elaborate than that offered by the conventional account. We use the recent China–X-Ray Equipment dispute as a case study to show that linkage between the two instruments may not be the consequence of a government-led policy but instead a result of firm-driven responses to an industrial policy. This in turn may lead to antidumping tit-for-tat behavior between WTO members. We also analyze how WTO litigation serves as a means to alter the payoff and discuss the implications and unresolved questions that remain following the China–X-Ray Equipment ruling by the WTO.

The WTO Panel report on China – Anti-dumping and Countervailing Duty Measures on Broiler Products from the United States was circulated to Members on 2 August 2013. In the report, the Panel examined a variety of issues challenged by the United States under various provisions of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 1994, the Anti-dumping Agreement and the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures. The Panel upheld the United States' claims on the majority of the issues, which covered certain procedural aspects of the anti-dumping and countervailing investigations such as the right to disclosure of ‘essential facts', as well as the substantive determinations including costing issues, the imposition of the ‘all others' rate on the basis of ‘facts available’, the price effects' analyses, the sufficiency of the public notices, and others. Notably the costing issues that came up in the case, although decided mostly on procedural grounds, provide food for thought, and are likely to feature again in future disputes.

The EC–Seal Products case stemmed from complaints by Canada and Norway against European Union regulations that effectively banned the importation and marketing of seal products from those countries. The EU said it had responded to European moral outrage at the killing of seals. Canada and Norway challenged the regime under various provisions of the Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) Agreement and the GATT. This article considers TBT aspects of the Panel and Appellate Body decisions. It discusses issues such as whether there is any bright line to be drawn between legitimate and illegitimate purposes in regulation, the proper legal meaning of a ‘technical regulation’, and the interpretation of TBT 2.1.