The anticipated increased usage of the WTO Dispute Settlement Understanding has raised concern due to the fact that most of the expected future disputes will most probably be initiated by ‘the usual suspects’ – countries such as the US, the EC, Canada, Brazil, India, Mexico, Korea, Japan, Thailand and Argentina. Statistics show that so far, 76% of all WTO disputes have been launched among this group of Members. This begs the question of engagement of other Members, and in particular of developing countries which may be facing undue trade restrictions.
Various reasons have been propounded for this lack of active engagement for the majority of the Membership, a number of which have been raised in the regional dialogues and case studies on dispute settlement which ICTSD conducted.