The WTO Dispute Settlement System 1995-2010: Some Descriptive Statistics

The Dispute Settlement (DS) system is a central feature of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement. This compulsory and binding two-level mechanism for the adjudication of disputes between WTO Members is the most active among international courts. The functioning of the DS system has attractive research interest among both lawyers and economists. This paper reports some descriptive statistics of the working of the DS system based on the recently updated Horn and Mavroidis WTO Dispute Settlement Data Set. The data set covers all 426 WTO disputes initiated through the official filing of a Request for Consultations from January 1, 1995, until August 11, 2011, and for these disputes it includes events occurring until July 28, 2011. There are in total approximately 67 000 observations. Each dispute is followed through its legal life via the panel stage, the Appellate Body stage, through to the implementation stage. The paper provides information on fundamental aspects of the use of the DS system, such as: • How active have the different countries been as complainants and as respondents? • Which agreements and which provisions are most commonly cited? • How are the adjudicating panels composed? • How successful have the different participants been?WTO; Dispute Settlement; Developing Countries

Renormalization Group Approach to Spectral Properties of the Two-Channel Anderson Impurity Model

The impurity Green function and dynamical susceptibilties for the two-channel Anderson impurity model are calculated. An exact expression for the self-energy of the impurity Green function is derived. The imaginary part of the self-energy scales as \sqrt{|\w/T_K|} for $T\to 0$ serving as a hallmark for non-Fermi behavior. The many-body resonance is pinned to a universal value $1/(2\pi\Delta)$ at \w=0. Its shape becomes increasingly more symmetric for the Kondo-regimes of the model. The dynamical susceptibilities are governed by two energy scales $T_K$ and $T_h$ and approach a constant value for \w\to 0, whereas relation \chi''(\w)\propto \w holds for the single channel model.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure, revte

The WTO Dispute Settlement System 1995-2016: \u3ci\u3eA Data Set and Its Descriptive Statistics\u3c/i\u3e

In this paper, we provide some descriptive statistics of the first twenty years of the WTO (World Trade Organization) dispute settlement that we have extracted from the data set that we have put together, and made publicly available. The statistical information that we present here is divided into three thematic units: the statutory and de facto duration of each stage of the process, paying particular attention to the eventual conclusion of litigation; the identity and participation in the process of the various institutional players, that is, not only complainants and defendants, but also third parties, as well as the WTO judges (panelists and Appellate Body members); and, finally, information regarding the subject-matter of various disputes, regarding the frequency with which claims regarding consistency of measures with the covered agreements (but also, at a more disaggregate level, e.g., specific provisions) have been raised. We call our work “descriptive statistics”, because, in an effort to provide raw material that will help researchers to conduct their research as they see fit, we have consciously refrained from systematically interpreting the data that we have assembled

Billiards and Brains: Cognitive Ability and Behavior in a p-Beauty Contest

"Beauty contests" are well-studied, dominance-solvable games that generate two interesting results. First, most behavior does not conform to the unique Nash equilibrium. Second, there is considerable unexplained heterogeneity in behavior. In this work, we evaluate the relationship between beauty contest behavior and cognitive ability. We find that subjects with high cognitive ability exhibit behavior that is closer to the Nash equlibrium. We examine this finding through the prism of economic and biological theory.beauty contest; rationality; cognitive ability; Nash equlibrium

Black Cat, White Cat: The Identity of the WTO Judges

WTO judges are proposed by the WTO Secretariat and elected to act as ‘judges’ if either approved by the parties to a dispute, or by the WTO Director-General in case no agreement between the parties has been possible. They are typically ‘Geneva crowd’, that is, they are either current or former delegates representing their country before the WTO. This observation holds for both first- as well as second-instance WTO judges (e.g. Panelists and members of the Appellate Body). In that, the WTO evidences an attitude strikingly similar to the GATT. Whereas the legal regime has been heavily ‘legalized’, the people called to enforce it remain the same

The WTO Dispute Settlement System: 1995-2010 Some Descriptive Statistics

This paper reports descriptive statistics based on the WTO Dispute Settlement Data Set (Ver. 3.0). The data set contains approximately 67 000 observations on a wide range of aspects of the Dispute Settlement (DS) system, and is exclusively based on official WTO documents. It covers all 426 WTO disputes initiated through the official filing of a Request for Consultations from January 1, 1995, until August 11, 2011, and for these disputes it includes events occurring until July 28, 2011.1 In this paper however, we will omit data pertaining to 2011 and only consider the full years 1995—2010. In order to shed some light on differences across WTO Members in participation in the DS system, we will divide Members into five groups, as specified in detail in Table 1. Broadly speaking, these groups are: G2 - The European Union (EU), and the United States (US); IND - Other industrialized countries; DEV - Developing countries other than LDC; LDC - Least developed countries; BIC - Brazil, India and China. The EU is taken to be EU-15, since the enlargements came relatively late during the period we cover. For the most part, the choice in this regard makes little difference quantitatively, since most of the 12 countries acceding to the EU in 2004 and 2007 have been relatively inactive in the WTO. The LDC group corresponds to the list of LDCs prepared by the United Nations. A more discretionary line is drawn between IND and DEV. We have classified under IND, OECD Members, the non-OECD Members among the 12 countries that most recently became members of the EU, those that are currently at an advanced stage of their accession negotiations, as well as countries that are not OECD Members but have a very high per capita income, such as Singapore. The DEV group consists of all countries which do not fit into either of the above mentioned categories, and are not BIC countries either. BIC refers to Brazil, India, and China: the sheer number of cases in which Brazil, India and China have participated, as well as their overall participation in WTO, led us to these three countries as a separate group. The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 highlights the evolution of the total use of the DS system; Section 3 discusses some aspects of participation of the groups defined above when acting as complainants or respondents; Section 4 deals with the subject-matter of disputes; Section 5 highlights a few aspects of countries’ success with regard to the legal claims they made before panels; Section 6 provides information as to the nationality and the appointment process of WTO panelists; Section 7 focuses on the duration of dispute settlement procedures at different stages of the adjudication process; Section 8 concludes

The effect of multiple paternity on genetic diversity during and after colonisation

In metapopulations, genetic variation of local populations is influenced by the genetic content of the founders, and of migrants following establishment. We analyse the effect of multiple paternity on genetic diversity using a model in which the highly promiscuous marine snail Littorina saxatilis expands from a mainland to colonise initially empty islands of an archipelago. Migrant females carry a large number of eggs fertilised by 1 - 10 mates. We quantify the genetic diversity of the population in terms of its heterozygosity: initially during the transient colonisation process, and at long times when the population has reached an equilibrium state with migration. During colonisation, multiple paternity increases the heterozygosity by 10 - 300 % in comparison with the case of single paternity. The equilibrium state, by contrast, is less strongly affected: multiple paternity gives rise to 10 - 50 % higher heterozygosity compared with single paternity. Further we find that far from the mainland, new mutations spreading from the mainland cause bursts of high genetic diversity separated by long periods of low diversity. This effect is boosted by multiple paternity. We conclude that multiple paternity facilitates colonisation and maintenance of small populations, whether or not this is the main cause for the evolution of extreme promiscuity in Littorina saxatilis.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, electronic supplementary materia

Description of a quantum convolutional code

We describe a quantum error correction scheme aimed at protecting a flow of quantum information over long distance communication. It is largely inspired by the theory of classical convolutional codes which are used in similar circumstances in classical communication. The particular example shown here uses the stabilizer formalism, which provides an explicit encoding circuit. An associated error estimation algorithm is given explicitly and shown to provide the most likely error over any memoryless quantum channel, while its complexity grows only linearly with the number of encoded qubits.Comment: 4 pages, uses revtex4. Minor correction in the encoding and decoding circuit

Local Spectral Weight of a Luttinger Liquid: Effects from Edges and Impurities

We calculate the finite-temperature local spectral weight (LSW) of a Luttinger liquid with an "open" (hard wall) boundary. Close to the boundary the LSW exhibits characteristic oscillations indicative of spin-charge separation. The line shape of the LSW is also found to have a Fano-like asymmetry, a feature originating from the interplay between electron-electron interaction and scattering off the boundary. Our results can be used to predict how edges and impurities influence scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) of one-dimensional electron systems at low temperatures and voltage bias. Applications to STM on single-walled carbon nanotubes are discussed.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figues, The latest version in pdf format is available at http://www.physik.uni-kl.de/eggert/papers/LSW-LL.pd