Chile’s Participation in the Dispute Settlement System: Impact on Capacity Building
Case Study
Mathias Francke of Chile reports on the participation of his country in the WTO Dispute Settlement Mechanism and how that has affected capacity building. As he briefly describes Chile’s strong presence within the mechanism, he concludes that the active participation is not proportional to the country’s share in world. As analysed in the second section, this high profile in the WTO DS mechanism is not reflected domestically, and it is not only the private sector who has little awareness of the importance of these matters, as is shown by the lack of governmental institutional structures and procedures to handle disputes in a harmonious way. Different explanations can be found for the circumstances, and different initiatives have been taken to remedy them. Section three of the paper deals with some of these initiatives in both the public and private sector and at the institutional and human resource level. The concluding section summarises the recommendations that can be extracted from the Chilean national experience and measures taken to increase capacity, awareness and experience in the handling of trade disputes.