The WTO allows its members to retaliate in the face of continued non-compliance. After more than ten years' operation and ten arbitration disputes, this volume assesses the law, economics and politics of trade sanctions in WTO dispute settlement. Including more than thirty contributions from leading academics, trade diplomats and practitioners, it offers a thorough analysis of the legal rules on permissible WTO retaliation as well as an assessment of the economic rationale and calculations behind the mechanism. In addition, it provides first hand experiences of those countries that have obtained WTO authorisation to retaliate, ranging from the United States and the EC to Mexico and Antigua. In this assessment, the question of how to make the system work also for small countries is paramount. Finally, the volume spells out lessons that could be learned from related fields such as remedies for non-compliance in investment arbitration and competition or anti-trust regimes.

With the WTO TRIPS Agreement, intellectual property issues have become an integral part of the world trading system. The Agreement probably represents the most significant and controversial development in world trade law. The Agreement is comprehensive in scope and contains standards for protection of a number of intellectual property rights as well as rules on the enforcement of such rights. Furthermore it closely links to the well-established traditional international system of the protection of intellectual property rights - the World Intellectual Properly Organization and related agreements, in particular the Paris and Berne Convention and the Madrid Agreement. This commentary covers the entire TRIPS Agreement. It adopts a comparative perspective in highlighting related and similar provisions and developments in other international and regional instruments, such as the ones mentioned above and, for instance the European Patent Convention. The volume is based on a close cooperation between the Intellectual Property Law Centre of the University of Dusseldorf and the Gottingen Institute for International Law and European Law, which aims at bringing together expertise in intellectual property law and general international law and trade law. It is designed to meet the needs both of the WTO and the intellectual property community.