Compliance with Notification Obligations in the World Trade Organization

The World Trade Organization (WTO) plays a crucial role in the establishing and maintaining of the rules that stabilize the world trading system and increase the benefits resulting from world trade. The achievement of these goals is strongly conditioned by the compliance of WTO member states. This compliance consists of the correspondence between states’ trade policies and the organization’s collective rules and decisions, as well as of the fulfillment of procedural obligations that stem from the organization’s membership. In this paper, we offer the first systematic descriptive and explanatory analysis of the compliance with notification obligations in the WTO. In the descriptive part of our analysis, we examine the member states’ compliance on the basis of a new and extensive data set, which maps the degree to which more than 130 states fulfilled approximately 50 most important notification obligations over a ten years period (2005-2015). We find out that there is considerable variation in the degree to which individual members notify the organization. To explain this variation, we test the explanatory power of several factors connected with WTO member states’ interests and capacities. We find out that the conformity of the state’s policy with the institution’s rules, as well as its interest in others’ compliance, provide a stronger explanation for the respect of obligations than the level of development and administrative capacity. This suggests that states are, in their fulfillment of the WTO’s notification requirements, guided more by their interests than by their capacities.