WTO Dispute Settlement and the Missing Developing Country Cases: Engaging the Private Sector

The poorest WTO member countries almost universally fail toengage as either complainants or interested third parties informal dispute settlement activity related to their market accessinterests. This paper focuses on costs of the WTO’s extendedlitigation process as an explanation for the potential but ‘missing’developing country engagement. We provide a positive examinationof the current system, and we catalogue and analyze a set ofproposals encouraging the private sector to provide DSU-specificlegal assistance to poor countries. We investigate the roleof legal service centres, non-governmental organizations, developmentorganizations, international trade litigators, economists, consumerorganizations, and law schools to provide poor countries withthe services needed at critical stages of the WTO’s extendedlitigation process. In the absence of systemic rules reform,the public-private partnership model imposes a substantial cooperationburden on such groups as they organize export interests, estimatethe size of improved market access payoffs, prioritize acrosspotential cases, engage domestic governments, prepare legalbriefs, assist in evidentiary discovery, and pursue the publicrelations effort required to induce foreign political compliance.