When the WTO regime has launched in 1995, most of the world have no doubts about the expectation that the reduced trade barriers would boost the world trade and economic growth.  There have been many studies on the effects of WTO regime on trade and growth.  However, after three years, there are not many studies on actual effects of the WTO regime.

This paper is an attempt to bridge such a gap between initial enthusiasm for the newly created WTO Regime and its actual effects.  This paper, especially, focuses on its dispute settlement regime and tries to extract the pattern of trade disputes and their settlement for last three years through the analysis of 83 cases that consultation has been requested through the dispute settlement body of the WTO.

For the qualitative analysis of the pattern of disputes and their settlements, this paper suggests several indexes that help indicate the degree of practical benefits that each country tries to get out of the dispute settlement mechanism of the WTO.  They are Simple Offensive Index, Panel Establishment Rate, and Complaint Success Rate.

Although there are limitation to use indexes, due to the lack of sufficient number of cases for each country, Simple Offensive Indices that indicates the aggressiveness of the use of dispute settlement mechanism, reveal that the United States and the European Communities are most active in filing cases against other countries.  However, Korea and Japan are shown to be at the bottom of the list.  Again in the case of Panel Establishment Rate, which indicates the activeness of defense in dispute settlement, the United States and the European Communities are on the top, which Korea and Japan are of the bottom.

In the later part, by conducting case studies on three selected cases, this paper attempts to extract the reason for the inactiveness of Korea in utilizing dispute settlement mechanism of the WTO.  For the more active utilization of the dispute settlement mechanism, it is suggested that Korea should have more efficient system of conducting its trade policy.

Especially, Korea should develop a formal as well as informal channels throughout business corporations, scientific experts and government officials, so that the actual need of business sector and professional knowledge of experts could be used in its administration of trade policy and dispute settlements.