entire 48-year GATT era, 1947 through 1994.<sup>3</sup> This increase may reflect perceived improvements in the dispute resolution process and thus a higher probability of getting results.

To establish a consistent accounting unit for characterizing disputes, we follow one strand of the literature and break disputes with multiple complainants into bilateral country pairs. For example, restate the _U.S. – Shrimp_ dispute (DS58), initiated by the combination of India, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Thailand and recorded in the WTO dispute-initiation data as a single dispute, as four bilateral disputes.<sup>4</sup> The basic list of 388 requests for consultations over the 1995-2008 period can be characterized as 415 bilateral disputes between pairs of WTO member countries.<sup>5</sup> Figure 1 illustrates WTO dispute initiations by year.

In Figure 1 and our subsequent analysis, we break the 1995-2008 period into two subperiods, reflecting a conspicuous break in dispute activity between the two. While the 1995-2000 period immediately following conclusion of the Uruguay Round averaged 41 disputes initiated per year, the 2001-2008 period averaged only 21 newly initiated cases per year – half the pace of the years immediately after founding of the WTO. At least three factors may have contributed to the sharp decrease in use of WTO dispute settlement after 2000. The first is that the conclusion of the Uruguay Round left some negotiating issues unresolved. Heavy initial use of the dispute settlement process in the early WTO era may reflect members’ efforts to address some of these lingering issues through a judicial

> 3 GATT contracting parties initiated a total of 254 disputes from 1947 through 1994 (Bown (2002, table 1). Unlike formal WTO disputes, which are governed by the Single Undertaking, GATT disputes were not centralized. Although most GATT disputes were initiated and reported under Article XXIII, some were brought forward under plurilateral codes signed by only a subset of GATT members, especially the Tokyo Round codes on subsidies and antidumping. Bown’s data are based on WTO (1995, 1997) and Hudec (1993). Hudec includes some GATT disputes substantively equivalent to Article XXIII disputes but initiated outside the prescribed Article XXIII channels (e.g., at GATT ministerials).

4 Even when the record shows multiple complainants taking on a single respondent over the same issue, this does not mean that the countries coordinated their actions in advance of dispute initiation. One important example is the WTO dispute over the 2002 U.S. steel safeguard import restriction. In this case, the DSU initiation data actually include nine separate _U.S. – Steel Safeguard_ requests for consultations.

5 Some bilateral disputes are, in fact, initiated more than once. For example, the first (DS16) WTO initiation of what ultimately turned into the _EC – Banana III_ dispute brought forward by Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and the U.S., was in September 1995; the second initiation (DS27) brought forward by those same four complainants along with Ecuador, took place in February 1996. Empirical research that focuses on the outcomes of WTO dispute settlement typically sorts disputes to eliminate redundant entries. Since we are focusing here only on the broad pattern of the initiation over time, we simply note the existence of some redundant disputes.

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