suggests that, on average, the WTO’s dispute settlement system was asked to scrutinize policies that covered trade in products that were roughly 0.5 percent of total world imports in 2011.<sup>20</sup>

# **3.3 WTO disputes that challenge newly-imposed policies versus non-reformed policies**

The statistics in Table 2 also allow for examination of _potential_ differences across WTO disputes, depending on whether the complainant’s allegation is that the respondent implemented a WTOinconsistent policy or that the respondent did not change a policy that its membership in the WTO requires. We do not have any theoretically-motivated expectations of potential differences that might arise depending on these two types of violations. At this stage, we only reiterate that there are more problems with measuring the market access associated with ‘no policy change’ types of disputes.<sup>21</sup>

# **_There is little difference in the levels of trade for WTO disputes involving policy changes versus the disputes over the failure to implement policy changes._**

There are two main takeaways from a comparison of the data on WTO disputes involving policy changes versus those that allege failure to change a policy to implement WTO commitments in Table 2. The first is a simple confirmation of the disparity in the range of market access described earlier – across both types of violations, there is vast heterogeneity in the scope of HS-06 products, dollar values of imports, and complainant’s share of the respondent’s import market of the disputed products.

The second result is that there are no statistically significant difference between the value of trade involving ‘policy change’ versus ‘no policy change’ disputes. This evidence is based on the Kolmogorov20 This $937.5 billion includes bilateral imports between the complainant and respondent in disputes associated with ‘partial’ policies, and all respondent imports in the disputed products when the dispute is associated with an alleged ‘global’ policy. For ‘policy change’ disputes, the pre-dispute year is the year prior to the implementation of the disputed policy. The subsequent back of the envelope calculation is derived by using the WTO's world import figure in 2011 (excluding intra-EU trade) of $14,485 billion, which we use our price deflator to convert to $10,882 billion (in 2005 dollars); i.e., $55 billion is 0.5 percent of total world imports in 2011.

21 For the “no policy change” category of WTO disputes, we are forced to rely on data from the year prior to the initiation of the WTO dispute, since we have not observed a pre-dispute year in which an arguably WTO-consistent policy had been in effect. In these disputes, the product coverage and the import market share variables may contain some useful information; nevertheless, the data on import values are only likely to reveal a lower bound for the level of the complainant’s market access interests. The count of HS-06 products defined in the dispute is likely to be unbiased; however, estimates of even the complainant’s share of the respondent’s import market are not likely to accurately reflect the relative importance of the complainant to the import market if the respondent’s policy (that has never been made WTO consistent) had been imposed on a basis that violates basic MFN treatment.

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