Panel Discussion: Europe 1992

Transcript of a panel on Europe in 1992

Insuring Your Donation An Experiment

An increasing fraction of donations is channeled through donation intermediaries. These enti-ties serve multiple purposes, one of which seems to be providing donors with greater certainty: that the donation reaches its intended goal, and that the donor may be sure to get a tax ben-efit. We interpret this function as insurance and test the option to insure donations in the lab. Our participants indeed have a positive willingness to pay for insurance against either risk. Yet the insurance option is only critical for their willingness to donate to a charity if the un-certainty affects the proper use of their donation

Scope/need for strengthening WTO rules, especially regarding, dispute settlement,institutional issues and functioning of the system in a globalising world

Introduction: Twenty years ago, while I was writing my doctoral thesis on voluntary export restraints and Article XX GATT, I applied for an internship with the GATT Secretariat. At that time the GATT Secretariat was a body with few lawyers and many economists. Law did not matter that much; indeed it was difficult for a young lawyer to get accepted as a “stagiare”. I insisted and eventually was accepted. Two years later, while studying with John Jackson I learned about the difference between power and rule-oriented diplomacy. GATT’s reliance on diplomacy did function reasonably well, even without a legal mechanism, yet there were spectacular cases of non-compliance and the system was always prone to “blackmail”. Compared to GATT, the WTO has come a long way. Nobody would have imagined at the start of the Uruguay Round that the result of the negotiations would be a World Trade Organisation with a binding dispute settlement mechanism. We went from a power-oriented to a rule-oriented system, which until now dealt reasonably well with more than 270 dispute settlement cases. Still, there are challenges to the system of which I would like to address four: Rulemaking versus Jurisprudence; Dispute Settlement; Avoidance Implementation; Dispute Settlement Refor

Panel Discussion: Europe 1992

Transcript of a panel on Europe in 1992