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The Political Economy Of Wto Dispute Settlement: Toward A Synthesis Of International Regime Theories, Christopher L. Griffin

University Avenue Undergraduate Journal of Economics

This paper analyzes the explanatory power of mainstream international regime theories from the international political economy (IPE) literature—neoliberalism, realism, and cognitivism—through formal econometric techniques. I use a data set based on 162 dispute settlement cases since the inception of the World Trade Organization and find that the probability of a Dispute Settlement Panel (DSP) forming depends on the share of exports for a target country as a share of its total exports as well as relative gaps in military expenditures (as a share of GDP). These results are highly robust to different model specifications and control variable choice. Though the …