Compliance with WTO dispute settlement decisions: Is there a crisis?

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.