An Evaluation on the GATT, the WTO’s Agreement on Safeguards, and the Dispute Settlement Procedure

Abstract

This study focuses on evaluating the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) Article XIX, the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Agreement on Safeguards (AoS), and the Dispute Settlement Procedure (DSP) for the safeguards by developing a theoretical model. To make a fair comparison, we analyse the timing of the DSP, the political ties between the safeguard imposing country and the countries whose exports are affected from these duties, ex-ante against interim safeguard tariffs, and we present respective extensions over the model initially developed Beshkar (2009). For this purpose, a model design is introduced for GATT, WTO, and DSP to find the incentive- compatible agreement that maximizes political welfare under the AoS, aiming to extend Beshkar’s analyses. We find that determining the safeguard tariff level at an interim step instead of ex-ante leads to the tariff that is politically the best for a country at that instant but does not necessarily lead to an optimal tariff. As a result, we reveal that WTO procedures do not always produce the best tariff options for the parties in safeguard measures.