disputes; one example was its domestic price support system for sugar. Australia, Brazil, and Thailand - other major exporters of sugar - ultimately challenged EU subsidies that had transformed it from a net importer to a net exporter of sugar, with the excess supply dumped onto export markets. Similarly, US agricultural policy, and various iterations of the US Farm Bill legislation in particular, has also been subject to considerable international scrutiny. For example, in 2002 Brazil brought a formal WTO dispute against US cotton subsidies. In both the EU and US disputes, the complaining countries’ concerns with the subsidy were less over their impact for lost sales to the policy-imposing country’s own market, and instead for lost sales competing with EU sugar or US cotton exports in third country markets.

Two additional industries - semiconductors and clean energy products - further highlight the complexities of subsidies arising as part of national industrial policies.

Semiconductors have been subject to considerable government intervention since at least the 1980s; indeed, our discussion of border barriers in the last section illustrated the industry as one in which antidumping and VERs were prevalent between the US and Japan.<sup>98</sup> More recently a leading Korean producer, Hynix, which accounted for 4 percent of _total_ Korean exports globally, became financially insolvent. In October 2001 and again in December 2002, Hynix’s creditors organized financial bail-outs designed to save the company. The US, EU and Japan, major importers and producers of semiconductors at the time, each asserted that the Korean government had subsidized the industry by orchestrating the bailouts, and they then each responded by imposing countervailing duties on Korean semiconductor exports to their markets.

This kind of dispute introduces another channel through which BTB policies can be impacted by WTO legal decisions; this is due to a particular way that certain areas of the WTO Agreements are structured. While the primary ‘policy’ triggering the friction between the US, EU, Japan and Korea was Korea’s (BTB) subsidy, the subject of the WTO dispute was the US and Japanese countervailing duty policies in _response_ to the Hynix bailout; not the bailout itself. In this kind of a dispute, for example, the WTO could not rule that Korea should reform its subsidy policy, it could, at most, direct the US or Japan to reform how their countervailing duty policies addressed the Korean subsidy (Hynix bailout) policy. However, any adjustments to the rules for when it is permissible for a trading partner to implement countervailing duties would be expected to _indirectly_ affect how a country like Korea implements its subsidy policies in the first place.

Finally, recent disputes over BTB policies have arisen in a number of interrelated markets for clean energy products. Here we describe solar panels, though similar BTB policies are affecting markets for wind towers and wind turbines.<sup>99</sup> Solar panels are potentially distinct from a number of other sectors in that their _consumption_ - i.e., a shift toward clean energy production and away from

> to produce a historical database of distortions to agricultural incentives covering the period of 1955-2011 (Anderson and Nelgen 2013). For a survey of the political economy of agricultural policy, see Anderson, Rausser and Swinnen (2013).

> 98Irwin and Klenow (1994) provide an empirical study of the semiconductor industry and learning-by-doing spillovers over the 1974-1992 period.

> 99This section draws from Crowley and Song (2015). Cosar, Grieco and Tintelnot (2015) provide an empirical study of the European wind turbine industry.

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