The first five articles in this issue are revised versions of papers presented at the Dartmouth–Tuck Forum on International Trade and Business Managing Global Trade: The WTO – Trade Remedies and Dispute Settlement, held in Washington, DC on 16–17 May 2003. The Forum was organized by Joseph Massey, Director of the Center for International Business at the Tuck School of Business, and Douglas Irwin, Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College. Funding for the Forum was provided by the Center for International Business at Dartmouth's Tuck School (www.tuck.dartmouth.edu/cib). All of the articles went through the World Trade Review's standard refereeing process.

The creation of the WTO revived the use of ‘safeguard’ measures to protect troubled industries against surges in import competition. Many of these measures have now been challenged in the WTO dispute resolution process, and in each case the process has found the challenged measure to be a violation of WTO law. This paper examines the WTO rules on safeguards from an economic perspective. Among other things, it argues that the textual preconditions for the use of safeguards in the treaty text are incoherent, and that the Appellate Body has compounded the problem through a series of dubious and unhelpful rulings. The result is a situation in which nations cannot use safeguards without facing a near certainty that they will be found invalid. Those who believe that safeguard measures are wasteful protectionism may welcome these developments, but it is by no means clear that the trading system will benefit in the long run.

US safeguard actions have run into problems with the WTO's panel and Appellate Body reviews for failing to ensure that injury caused by non-import factors is not attributed to imports. This paper reviews the subtle legal and economic differences between US trade law (Section 201) and the WTO's Agreement on Safeguards on the non-attribution issue. The paper then resurrects the Kelly (1988) method of attributing injury to various factors as a potential method by which the ITC can ensure that future decisions conform with the Safeguards Agreement. The method is shown to yield results that are consistent with recent ITC safeguard decisions.

Most-favored-nation treatment, i.e., nondiscrimination among trading partners, is a fundamental principle of the GATT/WTO system. The WTO Agreement on Safeguards has thus been seen as encouraging use of a preferred form of contingent protection relative to antidumping and other inherently discriminatory measures. In practice, however, safeguard protection may also incorporate discriminatory elements. This paper focuses on three ways that policies conforming to the Agreement on Safeguards may nonetheless discriminate explicitly or implicitly among trading partners. First, the form of the safeguard policy matters: quantitative restrictions discriminate among foreign suppliers by preserving historical market shares more than a safeguard implemented as a tariff. Second, safeguard measures discriminate against faster-growing exporters and new entrants in import markets. Third, formal exemptions for partners in preferential trade agreements and for small developing-country suppliers allow these countries to gain market share at the expense of non-exempted exporters. We provide evidence of these discriminatory effects in actual cases of safeguard protection.

This paper examines recent trends in the US antidumping process. We trace the experience of different groups of countries at each stage of the investigation process and through follow-up activity in disputes initiated at the GATT/WTO. The data reveal that lower income developing countries are more likely to be targeted, less likely to settle cases, more likely to confront high dumping duties, and less likely to bring cases to the WTO. We argue that differences in administrative and institutional ‘capacity’ may be a contributing factor that explains the observed bias facing developing countries, in addition to the other hypotheses that have been offered in the literature, such as higher protection and limited retaliatory ability.

Virtually every national trade remedy measure challenged in WTO dispute settlement has resulted in at least partial victory for the exporting country. In the anti-dumping area, the special standard of review for national interpretations of Anti-Dumping agreement obligations has had little discernible effect on dispute settlement outcomes. This pattern, while applauded by some as promoting liberal trade values, may actually result in less trade liberalization. If important trading countries like the United States believe that the Appellate Body will undermine provisions intended to preserve their ability to use trade remedies, they may decline to negotiate further disciplines on the use of these remedies or, possibly, to enter multilateral negotiations entirely. Although insufficient information exists to reach definitive conclusions, recent developments suggest that such negative effects are occurring in the Doha Round.

The United States (US) imposed, in July 1999, a safeguard on lamb meat, in the form of tariff rate import quotas, which were to be applied for a period of three years. The measure was based on findings by the US International Trade Commission that increased imports of lamb meat were a substantial cause of threat of serious injury to the US industry producing the like product. Following complaints by New Zealand and Australia that the measure was inconsistent with Articles I, II and XIX of GATT 1994, and several provisions of the Agreement on Safeguards, the World Trade Organization (WTO) Dispute Settlement Body established, in November 1999, a panel to review the consistency of the US measure with the mentioned WTO rules.