Author Description

The Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement (FTA) contained two significant innovations in trade dispute settlement: it established a general dispute settlement mechanism for trade disputes between Canada and the United States and it permitted private parties to choose to have administrative decisions in antidumping and countervailing duty cases reviewed by binational panels instead of courts. In this study, Bill Davey, now the Director of the Legal Affairs Division at the World Trade Organization, examines the operation of these two FTA dispute settlement mechanisms and evaluates their effectiveness in resolving trade disputes between Canada and the United States. The FTA was, of course, superseded as of January 1, 1994, by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Thus this study is particularly timely. As of June 1995, all of the dispute settlement panels appointed under the FTA had effectively completed their work, while no NAFTA cases had been completed. Any lessons learned from an examination of the FTA experience will be of more than historical interest, however, as the FTA's dispute settlement provisions were carried over with relatively minor modifications into NAFTA. Thus, those lessons will be directly relevant to the prospects for effective trade dispute settlement under NAFTA, as it is now constituted and as it may be expanded in the near future to include other countries in the Western Hemisphere. This book should be of particular interest to those affected by the dispute settlement system. For business and government readers, it offers a valuable explanation of how the binational panel process has worked in practice. For more general readers, it is a useful introduction to international dispute settlement and will help put into context the often over-blown rhetoric about the binational panel process.