Rethinking WTO Subsidy Disciplines for Sustainable Development

This paper examines the WTO legal framework governing subsidies and reviews recent reform proposals concerning the identification and categorization of subsidies under the SCM Agreement. It argues that the prevailing trade-distortion-centred approach to subsidy regulation is increasingly misaligned with the WTO’s sustainable development mandate. The paper therefore proposes a reform of WTO subsidy disciplines in which alignment with sustainable development objectives becomes a central criterion, alongside trade effects, for assessing the permissibility of subsidies, while preserving the fundamental principles of the multilateral trading system.

• Publication year

  2026

• Venue

  PRAWO i WIĘŹ

• Publication date

  2026-02-19

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.36128/8sn4zt38
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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