No iceberg in sight: on the absence of WTO disputes challenging fossil fuel subsidies

De Bièvre, Dirk; Espa, Ilaria; Poletti, Arlo (2017). No iceberg in sight: on the absence of WTO disputes challenging fossil fuel subsidies. International environmental agreements: politics, law and economics, 17(3), pp. 411-425. Springer 10.1007/s10784-017-9362-0

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The empirical record of dispute settlement cases under World Trade Organization (WTO) rules on energy subsidies consists only of cases against renewable energy (RE) subsidies, whereas WTO members have not challenged others’ much larger and environmentally harmful fossil fuel subsidies. Yet, the WTO agreement on subsidies and countervailing measures would at first sight seem to create possibilities to forestall environmentally harmful subsidization. In this article, we assess possible explanations for the skewed distribution of energy subsidies dispute settlement complaints at the WTO. We argue that differences in legally relevant characteristics of fossil fuel subsidies, on the one hand, and RE subsidies, on the other hand, largely explain this observation. In the case of RE subsidies, in particular, the disputes filed to date have targeted a much narrower set of measures than the whole range of RE subsidies currently in place, namely those incorporating a local content requirement component. Although this finding is not new, we have probed into this question more systematically, both by widening the scope of the empirical analysis from actual to potential WTO disputes on energy-related policies the European Union and the USA might have initiated, and by systematically assessing the plausibility of alternative explanations.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

02 Faculty of Law > Department of Economic Law > World Trade Institute
10 Strategic Research Centers > World Trade Institute

02 Faculty of Law > Department of Economic Law > NCCR International Trade Regulation

UniBE Contributor:

Espa, Ilaria

Subjects:

300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology > 340 Law
300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology > 380 Commerce, communications & transportation

ISSN:

1567-9764

Publisher:

Springer

Language:

English

Submitter:

Pablo Rahul Das

Date Deposited:

05 May 2017 10:25

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 15:04

Publisher DOI:

10.1007/s10784-017-9362-0

Related URLs:

BORIS DOI:

10.7892/boris.98165

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/98165

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