The multilateral trading system faces numerous challenges that are more profound than at any time in its seven-decade history. It has become commonplace to ask whether the system is in terminal decline. More than a dozen issues facing the WTO are identified in the paper, eight of which are defined as systemic. That is because they permeate and debilitate multiple facets of the workings of the WTO, including the capacity to negotiate, enforce disciplines, monitor policies, and ensure transparency. In no prioritized order, systemic issues arise in the areas of dispute settlement, development, decision-making, transparency, relations between states and markets, subsidies, emerging issues including climate change and digitalization, and trade and health. Other outstanding issues may not be as pervasive in impact, but can nevertheless undermine WTO relevance and effectiveness. All WTO members stand to lose in the absence of predictable multilateral trade rules that pre-commit parties to certain policies and processes. But in today's world, full convergence of all trade rules is a pipe dream. The system needs to balance convergence with managed divergence. Does the non-discrimination principle need to be layered by prior agreement in ways that ensure mutual gains from exchange?

The dispute settlement system of the World Trade Organization (WTO) knew considerable success in its early years, being described as the WTO's crown jewel. In recent years, the jewel has become tarnished. Its principal actor – the Appellate Body – is no longer functioning, and the practice of the membership has been to appeal almost all new panel reports, thereby consigning them to a legal limbo from which they seem unlikely to ever emerge. This paper briefly reviews the record of the WTO dispute settlement system, considers the problems that led to its current state and evaluates various proposals that have been made to reinvigorate the system.

With the benefit of hindsight, much scholarship across political science, law, and economics has told the story of the international trade regime as if it had been pulled all along by a definite aim. By contrast, this article emphasizes the contingent aspects of the trade regime's development, looking especially to its dispute settlement mechanism. The very creation of the Appellate Body had by no means a certain outcome, and once created, the tribunal's evolution was largely unanticipated by states. An often-overlooked actor played a key role in that development: the WTO Secretariat. Drawing on recent findings, this article lays out the full extent of the Secretariat's role in dispute settlement, which remains largely hidden from view, and deliberately so. From appointing adjudicators and managing their remuneration, to providing them with legal arguments and drafting final rulings, the Secretariat of the WTO looms larger than in any comparable tribunal. Making its influence more transparent, I argue, would go a long way to returning the system to the shape it was designed to have at its outset.

Unhappy with the rulings of the WTO dispute settlement system, which disproportionately targeted US use of trade remedies, the United States ended the entire system in 2019. There are multiple hurdles to agreeing to new terms of trade remedy use and thus potentially restoring some form of binding dispute settlement. First, a change would affect access to policy flexibility by the now large number of users of trade remedies. Second, although China's exports are the overwhelming target of trade remedies, exporters in other countries increasingly find themselves caught up in trade remedy actions linked to China. Third, critical differences posed by China's economic model may call for new rules for trade remedies, but no consensus on those rules has emerged. Even some of the most promising reforms have practical limitations, create additional challenges, or may be politically unviable.

Decades of negotiation to extend the GATT/WTO system to address subsidies have never produced the sort of uniform, scheduled rules that apply to tariffs or even services. Instead, WTO members have developed rules to demarcate permissible and impermissible subsidies. In this paper, I argue that the WTO approach is now hampered by shifts in the share of global trade away from geopolitically aligned, wealthy states and the growth of global supply chains. These pressures were magnified by the accession of China, with its centrality to global trade and recurrent geopolitical tensions with the United States. The challenges in facing cooperation over subsidies suggest limits to the ability for a ‘rules based’ approach to handle substantial changes in the global trading system.

Since its accession to the WTO twenty years ago, China's image has shifted from a good student aspiring to assimilate itself into the multilateral trading system to one that is increasingly alienated from key WTO principles. How has China's perspective on WTO been evolving? What are the reasons behind China's changing perspective? This paper answers these questions from the Chinese perspective with a comprehensive analysis of the key moments in China's first two decades in the WTO, followed by practical suggestions on how to engage China more constructively in the WTO and beyond.

The commonplace narrative regarding China's participation in the WTO is that the original expectations have not been matched in subsequent experience. China has not behaved in accordance with the spirit (and sometimes the letter) of its commitments. Reactions by trading partners have been from critical to hostile, and some have even called for a WTO without China, ignoring the boost to international trade that China's accession has provoked. Yet, China's participation in the WTO cannot remain un-addressed. The US almost brought the WTO to its knees largely because of China, and the EU has enacted laws to counteract China's trade expansion. In this short paper, we argue that the solution to the China-issue passes through an addition and re-invigoration of the multilateral trade rules.

Although globalization and the world trade regime have reduced the significance of distance between countries, within countries geography matters now more than ever. Inside countries’ borders, economic activities, such as production and employment, occur unevenly across space. As a result, international trade impacts parts of a country differently. Some areas benefit from rising trade, while others experience reductions in local wages and employment as a result of increased import competition. Because regions’ experience of globalization varies, public opinion about trade differs across geographic areas within countries. Voters living in regions advantaged by trade are more likely to support economic openness, while voters living in regions negatively impacted by trade are more skeptical of the benefits of globalization. The geographic disparities in public attitudes towards trade often align with salient political cleavages. As a result, debates over trade have become increasingly polarized in many countries, which may threaten states’ continued economic openness as well as their engagement with, and even support for, the world trade regime.

This paper reviews the trade agreement landscape and argues that the conventional understanding of trade agreements as encapsulated in the WTO Agreements is now outdated. This misperception about trade agreements is not just an institutional insufficiency. Concentration on those agreements has led many practitioners and commentators to underestimate the variable texture of the global trade agreement fabric. But these shortcomings have not inhibited states from concluding innovative alternatives to regulate and manage the cross-border movement of goods and services. As this paper shows, trade-related agreements that do not fit the perceived traditional mold have proliferated. Given these advances, more policy and scholarly attention is required. Accordingly, this paper serves as a roadmap for the accommodation of trade agreements within the WTO and as an agenda for additional research.