This book presents the reflections of a group of researchers interested in assessing whether the law governing the promotion and protection of foreign investment reflects sound public policy. Whether it is the lack of "checks and balances" on investor rights or more broadly the lack of balance between public rights and private interests, the time is ripe for an in-depth discussions of current challenges facing the international investment law regime.

Through a survey of the evolution in IIA treaty-making and an evaluation from different perspectives, the authors take stock of developments in international investment law and analyze potential solutions to some of the criticisms that plague IIAs. The book takes a multidisciplinary approach to the subject, with expert analysis from legal, political and economic scholars. The first part of the book traces the evolution of IIA treaty-making whilst the other three parts are organised around the concepts of efficiency, legitimacy and sustainability. Each contributor analyzes one or more issues related to substance, treaty negotiation, or dispute resolution, with the ultimate aim of improving IIA treaty-making in these respects.

Improving International Investment Agreements will be of particular interest to students and academics in the fields of International Investment Law, International Trade Law, Business and Economics.

This book is a review of the development of the WTO dispute resolution procedure and the power and influence it has gained over the practises of the member countries as well as in other international treaties. The book addresses the development of environmental competency in the WTO and examines the arguments of those who oppose WTO rule making with impacts on the environment. The WTO's interactions with multilateral environmental agreements are considered and recent WTO cases including the 2011 US/Mexico tuna dispute and the US sea turtles decision are analysed in detail. In examining how an international organisation which was established with a specific purpose in mind has come to interact in fields beyond its original remit, James Watson demonstrates how the dispute resolution system at the WTO has come to work in a judicialised manner, operating with an informal system of precedent. This has led to the contracting parties placing more reliance on the decisions of the dispute panels and appeal body when considering policy options, with WTO rulings increasingly influencing the behaviour of national legislatures in regard to the environment. The book goes on to make concrete recommendations, based on existing practise in the WTO dispute resolution procedure, which could enhance decision making in environmental cases heard by the WTO. The book argues that this could be achieved with straightforward amendments to the WTO, based on existing practices endorsed under the WTO for other policy considerations. The WTO and the Environment will be of particular interest to academics and students of International and Environmental law.

Many firms operate in complex legal environments where several States may regulate the same activity against a background of international law. International competition law has grown in importance as national economies have become more integrated, at the same time as national competition laws have proliferated and enforcement efforts have been strengthened. This system is beset with conflicts arising where States perceive that the way that another country does or does not apply its competition law adversely affects its interests. This book clarifies the nature and origin of these conflicts, and explores possible ways to reduce them.
Noonan analyses the legal and policy issues associated with the control of restrictive business practices and anticompetitive mergers in international markets. The book discusses international cartels, dumping, private market access barriers, and mergers between international firms subject to multi-agency review. Subjects covered include the harmonization and coordination of competition laws, cooperation between enforcement agencies, international judicial assistance, and the role of trade agreements and the World Trade Organization in international competition law. Noonan also examines the problems that States have in regulating conduct beyond their borders and the merits of a variety of potential responses.
He contends that there is an evolving international competition law system, albeit a somewhat chaotic one. States are only just beginning to see the system as a whole and are struggling to identify where their long-term interests lie. This book describes the elements of the system and their interactions, and explains how the system isevolving; suggesting what States, individually and collectively, could do to modify the system to their mutual advantage.

This book focuses on international harmonisation and the law of secured transactions by distilling and analysing the unifying principles of various significant international conventions and instruments such as the UN Convention on the Assignment of Receivables, the Unidroit Convention on International Factoring, the EBRD Model Law on Secured Transactions, the Unidroit Convention on the International Interests in Mobile Equipment and the UNCITRAL Legislative Guide on Secured Transactions. International secured transactions conventions and instruments facilitate credit and promote economic activity through the creation of harmonised rules. Therefore, given the increasing globalisation of markets, international reform efforts for the harmonised modernisation of secured transactions law have gained pace over recent years. International Secured Transactions Law draws on experiences in both English and US laws in order to identify and illustrate the existing problems that need to be addressed, as well as identify potential solutions. International Secured Transactions Law will be of interest to scholars, students interested in international commercial law, corporate law or comparative secured transactions, and practitioners involved in international commercial transactions.

In the wake of the global financial crisis, there has been a worldwide search for alternative investment opportunities, away from advanced markets. The African continent is now one of the fastest-growing economic regions in the world and represents a viable destination for foreign direct and portfolio investment. This book, which is the first comprehensive analysis of financial integration and regulation in Africa, fills a huge gap in the literature on financial regulation and would constitute an invaluable source of information to policy makers, investors, researchers and students of financial regulation from an emerging and frontier markets perspective. It considers how financial integration can facilitate African financial markets to achieve their full potential and provides a comparative study with the EU framework for financial integration and regulation. It assesses the implementation of effective and regional domestic infrastructures and how these can be adapted to suit the African context. The book also provides an assessment of government policies towards the integration of financial regulation in keeping with the regional agenda of the African Union (AU) and the African Economic Community (AEC).

Is a State free to adopt measures to protect the public health of its citizens? If so, what are the limits, if any, to such regulatory powers? This book addresses these questions by focusing on the clash between the regulatory autonomy of the state and international investment governance. As a wide variety of state regulations allegedly aimed at protecting public health may interfere with foreign investments, a tension exists between the public health policies of the host state and investment treaty provisions. Under most investment treaties, States have waived their sovereign immunity, and have agreed to give arbitrators a comprehensive jurisdiction over what are essentially regulatory disputes. Some scholars and practitioners have expressed concern regarding the magnitude of decision-making power allocated to investment treaty tribunals.

This book contributes to the current understanding of international investment law and arbitration, addressing the fundamental question of whether public health has and/or should have any relevance in contemporary international investment law and policy. With a focus on the clash of cultures between international investment law and public health, the author critically analyses the emerging case law of investment treaty arbitration and considers the theoretical interplay between public health and investor rights in international investment law. The book also explores the interplay between investment law and public health in practice, focusing on specific sectors such as pharmaceutical patents, tobacco regulation and environmental health. It then goes on to analyze the available means for promoting consideration of public health in international investment law and suggests new methods and approaches to better reconcile public health and investor rights.

This book expands on law-related research by comprehensively examining the legal aspects of sustainability with a focus on the impact on business strategies, investigating the impact of law and regulation on business sustainability strategies through a variety of legal lenses. It assumes that firms must adopt an integrated approach to law and sustainability, considers multiple disciplines and goals and joins scholarship from fields such as environmental law, energy, government regulation and intellectual property.

Firms increasingly have an interest in transitioning to sustainable business practices that take into consideration the fact that global resources are finite and will be increasingly scarce. They acknowledge that current actions have social, economic and environmental consequences and employ options to ensure that future generations have the same options and benefits.Examples of sustainable practices increasingly employed by firms include the institutionalization of whole life-cycle analysis in marketing and product design, utilization of sustainable inputs and energy sources, tracking and reporting sustainability performance, attempting the valuation of future generation prosperity and happiness as a discounting mechanism and integrating sustainability into firm culture and management goals.

It is clear that law and regulation have an extremely important role to play in the transition to more sustainable business practices. Broadly stated, law can provide structure for firms responding to forces that pull transition by enabling sustainability leadership and competitive advantage through funding models, intellectual property rights and collaboration means.Additionally, law can work to push transition by compelling firms to act through regulatory structures, accounting and governance mechanisms.Finally, coherent legal approaches are necessary to harmonize transition across countries by aligning and adapting goals to promote an equitable global marketplace that promotes development.

Representing a variety of areas and perspectives, the authors go beyond the existing legal literature to explore the impact of sustainability law on business practice and its implications for policy and future research."

“… presents a very different case: that of a civilized and cultivated cosmopolitan legal scholar, with a keen sense of international commercial and financial practice, with an in-depth grounding in both comparative legal history and comparative law, combined with the ability to transcend conventional English black-letter law description with critical judgment towards institutional wisdom and intellectual fashions.” (International and Comparative Law Quarterly) Volume 5 of this new edition uses the insights developed in Volumes 3 and 4 to deal with financial products and financial services, the structure and operation of banking and of the capital markets, and the role of modern commercial and investment banks. Sections on products and services address the blockchain and its potential in the payment system, in securitisations, in the custodial holdings of investment securities, and in the derivative markets. The complete set in this magisterial work is made up of 6 volumes. Used independently, each volume allows the reader to delve into a particular topic. Alternatively, all volumes can be read together for a comprehensive overview of transnational comparative commercial, financial and trade law.

The Dispute Settlement Reports of the World Trade Organization (WTO) include Panel and Appellate Body reports, as well as arbitration awards, in disputes concerning the rights and obligations of WTO members under the provisions of the Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization. These are the WTO authorized and paginated reports in English. An essential addition to the library of all practicing and academic trade lawyers and needed by students worldwide taking courses in international economic or trade law. DSR 2015: Volume 3 reports on United States - Anti-Dumping Measures on Certain Shrimp from Viet Nam (WT/DS429).

In noting that the actions of entities other than states in the economic arena can and often do have a profound effect on human rights, this book poses the question as to how international human rights law can and should address that situation. This book takes three very different categories of international actor the World Trade Organization, the international financial institutions (World Bank and IMF) and multinational enterprises and analyses the interaction of each category with human rights, in each case analysing the interaction of the different fields of law and seeking to identify a role for international human rights law.

Adam McBeth concludes that each of the selected international economic actors can and should be considered to operate within a holistic system of international law, including human rights obligations, but that changes in the operations and the accountability mechanisms for each actor are necessary for the practical implementation of that approach.

While written from a human rights perspective, the underlying theme of the book is one of engagement and harmonisation rather than condemnation. It provides valuable insight for those who approach this topic from a background of international trade law, commercial law or general international law, just as much as those who have a human rights background. International Economic Actors and Human Rights will be of great interest to those studying or working in any field of international economic law, as well as human rights scholars and practitioners.

International legal scholarship is concerned with the fragmentation of international law into specialised legal systems such as trade, environment and human rights. Fragmentation raises questions about the inter-systemic interaction between the various specialised systems of international law. This study conceptually focuses on the interaction between World Trade Organisation (WTO) law and external international law. It introduces a legal theory of WTO law, constrained openness, as a way to understand that interaction. The idea is that WTO law, from its own internal point of view, constructs its own law. The effect is that external international law is not incorporated into WTO law wholesale, but is (re)constructed as WTO law. It follows that legal systems do not directly communicate with each other. Therefore, to influence WTO law, an indirect strategic approach is required, which recognises the functional nature of the differentiated systems of the fragmented international legal system.

This book discusses the law of safeguard measures as laid down in the WTO agreements and cases decided by the Panel and the Appellate Body. It sets out a comprehensive treatment of safeguard measures covering the history and evolution of the law, as well as the procedural requirements and the application of safeguard measures. In addition to measures under Article XIX and the Safeguards Agreement, the book includes coverage of safeguard measures for agricultural products, Special Safeguard Measures for developing countries, safeguard measures for textiles and proposed safeguard measures under General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) as well as special safeguard clauses against China. Recognition and Regulation of Safeguard Measures Under GATT/WTO considers safeguards from a developing country's perspective drawing on Joseph E. Stiglitz's argument that developing countries require these trade remedy measures to protect their domestic industries and ensure their development. Sheela Rai considers this view and goes on to examine how beneficial the provisions relating to safeguard measures and their interpretation given by the Panel and Appellate Body have been for developing countries.

This book provides new insights into the economic impacts, strategic objectives and legal structures of an emerging branch of government incentives conditioned on meeting intellectual property-related requirements. Despite becoming more common in recent years, such incentives - ranging from patent fee subsidies and patent box tax deductions to inventor remuneration schemes - are still under-researched. A diverse range of analytical methods, including econometric analyses, case studies and comparative legal analysis, are used to study these incentives in countries in Europe and China. Scholars, policymakers and practitioners can benefit from the conceptual and practical insights as well as policy recommendations provided.

This book focuses on international harmonisation and the law of secured transactions by distilling and analysing the unifying principles of various significant international conventions and instruments such as the UN Convention on the Assignment of Receivables, the Unidroit Convention on International Factoring, the EBRD Model Law on Secured Transactions, the Unidroit Convention on the International Interests in Mobile Equipment and the UNCITRAL Legislative Guide on Secured Transactions. International secured transactions conventions and instruments facilitate credit and promote economic activity through the creation of harmonised rules. Therefore, given the increasing globalisation of markets, international reform efforts for the harmonised modernisation of secured transactions law have gained pace over recent years. International Secured Transactions Law draws on experiences in both English and US laws in order to identify and illustrate the existing problems that need to be addressed, as well as identify potential solutions. International Secured Transactions Law will be of interest to scholars, students interested in international commercial law, corporate law or comparative secured transactions, and practitioners involved in international commercial transactions.

International investment law is one of the fastest growing areas of international law. It has led to the signing of thousands of agreements, mostly in the form of investment contracts and bilateral investment treaties. Also, in the last two decades, there has been an exponential growth in the number of disputes being resolved by investment arbitration tribunals. Yet the legal principles at the basis of international investment law and arbitration remain in a state of flux. Perhaps the best illustration of this phenomenon is the wide disagreement among investment tribunals on some of the core concepts underpinning the regime, such as investment, property, regulatory powers, scope of jurisdiction, applicable law, or the interactions with other areas of international law. The purpose of this book is to revisit these conceptual foundations in order to shed light on the practice of international investment law. It is an attempt to bridge the growing gap between the theory and the practice of this thriving area of international law. The first part of the book focuses on the 'infrastructure' of the investment regime or, more specifically, on the structural arrangements that have been developed to manage foreign investment transactions and the potential disputes arising from them. The second part of the book identifies the common conceptual bases of an array of seemingly unconnected practical problems in order to clarify the main stakes and offer balanced solutions. The third part addresses the main sources of 'regime stress' as well as the main legal mechanisms available to manage such challenges to the operation of the regime. Overall, the book offers a thorough investigation of the conflicting theoretical positions underlying international investment law, testing their worth by reference to concrete issues that have arisen in the jurisprudence. It demonstrates that many of the most important practical questions arising in practice can be addressed by a carefully dosed resort to theory.

This book presents a first comprehensive effort to explore the mechanics and fundamentals of global ICT standardization. It offers a comprehensive study of legal rules governing ICT standardization; systematically analyses governance and institutional features of some most prominent Standards Development Organizations; and presents qualitative empirical evidence on implementation of these rules in practice. By evaluating legal and procedural rules in light of current practices and tendencies in the industry, the book explores various options available for disciplining ICT standardization from the viewpoint of the applicable legislation, judiciary, and internal governance rules of Standards Development Organizations and offers practical solutions on how to increase the legitimacy of ICT standards. Adding to the previous theoretical approach to the field of standardization from historical, legal and political science perspective, this book applies theoretical considerations to unexplored scenarios, offering a holistic picture of ICT standardization and providing a novel contribution to the field.

The Dispute Settlement Reports of the World Trade Organization (WTO) include Panel and Appellate Body reports, as well as arbitration awards, in disputes concerning the rights and obligations of WTO members under the provisions of the Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization. These are the WTO authorized and paginated reports in English. An essential addition to the library of all practicing and academic trade lawyers and needed by students worldwide taking courses in international economic or trade law. DSR 2015: Volume 2 reports on Argentina - Measures Affecting the Importation of Goods (WT/DS438, WT/DS444, WT/DS445).

Trade multilateralism in the twenty-first century faces a serious test as weakness in the global economy and fast-paced technological changes create a challenging environment for world trade. This book examines how an updated and robust, rules-based multilateral framework, anchored in the WTO, remains indispensable to maximizing the benefits of global economic integration and to reviving world trade. By examining recent accessions to the WTO, it reveals how the growing membership of the WTO has helped to support domestic reforms and to strengthen the rules-based framework of the WTO. It argues that the new realities of the twenty-first century require an upgrade to the architecture of the multilateral trading system. By erecting its 'upper floors' on the foundation of existing trade rules, the WTO can continue to adapt to a fast-changing environment and to maximize the benefits brought about by its ever-expanding membership.

This book focuses on Chinese cases on the CISG decided by Chinese courts of all levels, mainly from 2006 to 2010. During this period, the number of cases grew gradually. The total number of cases still remained low, the reasons of which might be the following: parties were not familiar with the CISG and therefore decided to opt out of it; in addition, the case collection and report systems in China at that time were not as developed as now, rendering many cases inaccessible. This book provides a comprehensive and detailed analysis of selected cases. The analysis of those cases will be on a case by case basis. For each case, an English summary of the judgments will be provided. In the summary, the People’s Court’s approach to the interpretation and application of the CISG will be emphasised. Following the summary are comments of the individual case written either by an academic or a current or former judge from international and comparative perspective to discuss the successes and pitfalls of the interpretation and application of the CISG. This book deals with the cases from 2006 to 2010 in China. These cases reflect how People’s Court of all levels started to deal with various issues arising from the CISG and will help understand whether and how the People’s Courts change their approaches to the interpretation and application of the CISG in future.

This book analyzes the conflict that emerges between parties after a breach of contract and how different legal remedies can best reduce conflict. Causes for conflict include equity, efficiency, and ethical reasons that parties might consider and use to blame the other or to justify breach. In the end, if not resolved through apologies or renegotiation, conflict leads to aggrievement and behavioral reactions in form of retaliation by the victim against the promisor in breach. The book provides empirical evidence from laboratory experiments for how individuals react to perceived wrongful acts such as breach of contract and for the function of legal remedies to reduce retaliation by disappointed promisees in providing them compensation. It reveals how the inequality in the outcome, and not the inefficiency of breach of contract, causes aggrievement and retaliation by victims. The book concludes with a comparative law and economic analysis of remedies for breach of contract adopted in different leading jurisdictions, with important normative implications for the American insistence on expectation damages, the French expansion of specific performance with "astreinte", the German junction of specific performance, expectation damages, and disgorgement damages, and the British timid acceptance of partial disgorgement damages. The book will appeal to scholars, researchers, and students of economics and law, interested in a better understanding of remedies for breach of contract.

This work analyzes and compares the legal framework for foreign investments in the mining sector in Australia, South Africa and Colombia. The admission of foreign investments, corporate structure requirements, ownership of minerals and mineral rights, mining licenses, land access, performance requirements, distribution of profits and the tax regime, repatriation of profits, national and international dispute resolution mechanisms and the question of the Social License to Operate (SLO) / Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policies are discussed in detail. The work concludes with an outlook on the future regulation of foreign mining investments and finally suggests the development of an International Mining Investment Law.

Rules, Rubrics and Riches highlights the limitations of existing approaches to understanding the relationship of the law to the process of development. It interrogates neoclassical economic thinking that draws on the narrow rubric of self-interest to understand the acquisition of riches. It takes issue with both the traditional 'law and development' movement, that was unable to shake colonial overtones, and the more recent 'law and economics' school that continues to emphasise the centrality of rational man at the micro level and the superiority of linear models of economic progress at the macro level. Written as an analysis of and commentary on the contribution of the law to international development, using legal cases and development trajectories in China, India and Malaysia, the book makes the case that individuals do not operate in a vacuum but rather within the social contexts of larger human structures such as family, community and nation. Rules, Rubrics and Riches is distinctive in the view that demanding equality for the individual is inappropriate if this occurs without looking at the broader context of the need for equity: within families, communities and nations. The book offers a new frame for 'law and development' thinking that point to a new set of rules, using a broader rubrics to ensure a sustainable accumulation of riches. It will be of interest to students and scholars working in the fields of law and development, development studies and international and comparative law.

In the debate over the treatment of China in trade remedy investigations, this book focuses exclusively on anti-subsidy law. As such, it brings a long neglected and often underestimated area of international trade law to the fore.Exploring the delicate relations between the WTO, the EU and China, it focuses on the current legal framework for the use of alternative benchmarks in anti-subsidy law and analyses the consequences that arise from its practical application in investigations against China. Scrutinizing recent developments in WTO anti-subsidy law, in particular the adoption of country-specific rules in accession protocols, the book reveals the shortcomings of the current approach and argues for fundamental reforms. Accordingly, the book provides academics and practitioners alike with vital insights into the legal evolution and practical application of alternative benchmark methodologies in the context of WTO and EU anti-subsidy law, while also putting forward a critical analysis of the status quo.

In noting that the actions of entities other than states in the economic arena can and often do have a profound effect on human rights, this book poses the question as to how international human rights law can and should address that situation. This book takes three very different categories of international actor - the World Trade Organization, the international financial institutions (World Bank and IMF) and multinational enterprises - and analyses the interaction of each category with human rights, in each case analysing the interaction of the different fields of law and seeking to identify a role for international human rights law.

Adam McBeth concludes that each of the selected international economic actors can and should be considered to operate within a holistic system of international law, including human rights obligations, but that changes in the operations and the accountability mechanisms for each actor are necessary for the practical implementation of that approach.

While written from a human rights perspective, the underlying theme of the book is one of engagement and harmonisation rather than condemnation. It provides valuable insight for those who approach this topic from a background of international trade law, commercial law or general international law, just as much as those who have a human rights background. International Economic Actors and Human Rights will be of great interest to those studying or working in any field of international economic law, as well as human rights scholars and practitioners.