Conferences and symposia on the World Trade Organization (WTO) have been proliferating in connection with the organization's tenth anniversary, with a particular focus on the WTO dispute settlement system – how it is working, what difficulties have arisen, how its rules might evolve, etc. These events typically feature a certain amount of hand-wringing over the fact that adopted WTO dispute settlement decisions have only a limited, indirect influence on the subsequent behaviour of losing respondents, and sometimes are not implemented promptly or at all. Some observers have gone so far as to proclaim the existence of a ‘compliance crisis’, with potentially ruinous consequences for the WTO and the trading system more generally.

This chapter contains observations on the compliance issue in four sections. Section 1 gives an overall perspective on the compliance record. Section 2 discusses factors that may underlie occasional non-compliance. Section 3 argues that non-compliance on the scale and of the type observed so far does not qualify as a ‘crisis’. Section 4 briefly suggests some criteria for how one might expect WTO Members to behave if they conclude in the future that a real compliance crisis has arisen.

Overall record of compliance, including US compliance

Several quantitative analyses have been done in this area, and I will not seek to repeat or improve on them here. The story they tell is not calamitous.