Suchergebnisse

The March 2019 release of the Appellate Body's compliance report in United States-- Measures Affecting Trade in Large Civil Aircraft (Second Complaint) marks yet another chapter in the ongoing Boeing-Airbus dispute. While raising numerous new and old subsidy issues, this paper focuses on one specific aspect, the evaluation of the financial contributions and benefits associated with the Department of Defense (DOD) R&D procurement contracts. The paper describes the differing views taken by the panels compared to the Appellate Body. It highlights two issues that led to an extremely lengthy proceeding: 1) the black or white nature of the decision regarding the characterization of contracts which have features of both purchases of services and joint ventures; and 2) the difficulty in demonstrating a financial contribution flowing from payments for R&D for military systems to Boeing's civil aircraft production. It concludes that this case represents a failure of the WTO dispute settlement system and underscores flaws in the ASCM in that after fifteen years of litigation, no determination was made as to whether or not the DOD R&D contracts examined here constituted impermissible subsidies.

In October 2014, the European Union requested consultations with Russia under the WTO's dispute settlement system regarding Russia's tariff treatment of various agricultural and manufacturing products. Although most of the measures challenged by the EU were individual tariff lines, the final measure in its complaint was a "more general measure" referred to as the systematic duty variation. A WTO dispute panel eventually ruled that the EU failed to establish the systematic nature of the duty treatment afforded by Russia to certain products. In this paper, we explore the dispute panel's ruling, as well as how claims of systematic non-compliance are treated in other legal settings. We conclude by exploring whether future WTO panels should instead consider statistical evidence of systematic treatment to promote compliance.

The U.S. Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program provides workers who have lost their jobs due to increased trade with income support and training, job search, and relocation benefits. This paper uses data collected by the Department of Labor on TAA beneficiaries to provide the most recent econometric evaluation of the effectiveness of the TAA program. Summary statistics suggest that the TAA program successfully targets displaced workers who have a greater difficulty finding new employment. However, using propensity score matching techniques we find that while the required training component of the program improves the employment outcomes of beneficiaries, on average the TAA program has no discernible impact on the employment outcomes of the participants. (JEL F16)

Abstract This is the first empirical study to examine Congressional support of a new law that distributes antidumping duties to protected firms. Because the law produces a transparent measure of how much each firm was rewarded for its efforts to secure the bill's passage, it provides researchers with a unique opportunity to study the link between the expected financial returns to firms, campaign contributions, and Congressional behaviour. Our results indicate that campaign contributions from beneficiaries increased the likelihood that lawmakers would sponsor the law, while contributions from the law's beneficiaries increased with the rewards they expected to receive.