Supply of Policy Information in the World Trade Organization: Cross-National Compliance with One-Time and Regular Notification Obligations, 1995–2014

This text presents the first systematic quantitative descriptive and explanatory account of World Trade Organization (WTO) member states’ compliance with their one-time and regular notification obligations. The system of around 170 notifications, through which states are obliged to provide to the WTO relevant information on their policies, constitutes a key mechanism of transparency in the global trade regime. Based on data for the one-time and regular obligations from the years 1995–2014, we seek to map and explain the variation in the degree to which states comply with these obligations. Descriptively, we identify enormous differences in the compliance values of states, ranging from compliance well above 80% to below 20%. To explain those differences, we test five theoretical explanations that concentrate on the trade policy preferences of states and on their institutional characteristics. The empirical findings support four of the tested explanations. In particular, they highlight the relevance of states’ administrative capacities and membership in international organizations (IOs). In addition, the empirical analysis shows that compliance levels are strongly positively connected with the economic size of the members.