Despite the partisan claims and counter-claims on both sides of the long-running dispute over alleged
subsidies between Airbus and Boeing, it remains extremely unclear whether or not the World Trade Organization (WTO) will ever definitively resolve the issue. On September 3, the WTO sent both parties its confidential interim report into Boeing’s allegations that Airbus has benefited from illegal direct state subsidies for airliner programs such as the A380. The fact that the WTO hasn’t published its findings didn’t stop the financial media and an assortment of industry analysts filling cyberspace with claims–for which they offered no concrete evidence or attributable sources–that the WTO had largely found in favor of Boeing.
By contrast, undisclosed sources supposedly close to Airbus countered that the WTO interim report had actually excluded many of Boeing’s complaints against the European airframer. For its part, the WTO has stressed that its findings on the allegations against Airbus do not stand in isolation and that before the end of the year it will issue a similar interim report on Airbus’s allegations that the U.S. government has indirectly subsidized Boeing programs.
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