Economic development is the most important agenda in the international trading system today, as demonstrated by the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) adopted in the current multilateral trade negotiations of the World Trade Organization (the Doha Round). This book provides a relevant discussion of major international trade law issues from the perspective of development in the following areas: general issues on international trade law and economic development; and specific law and development issues in World Trade Organization, Free Trade Agreement, and regional initiatives. Although there are publications on trade and development issues, mostly discussing developing countries, few publications deal with law and development issues of international trade law comprehensively in its key areas. This book offers an unparalleled breadth of coverage on the topic and diversity of authorship, as seventeen leading scholars contribute chapters from nine major developed and developing countries, including the United States, Canada, Japan, China (including Hong Kong), South Korea, Australia, Singapore, and Israel.

The legitimacy or illegitimacy of information exchanges between competitors remains a topical debate with regard to EU competition law and policy. This book reexamines the issue in the retail financial services sector, focusing on the peculiar problems that it poses for EU market integration, consumer policy and protection and the intersection with fundamental rights. It analyzes and reflects on the relevant case law and guidelines offered by the corresponding European authorities, providing a critique of the current approach and advancing the proposition that information markets themselves need attention, in addition to the markets that they serve. The book also advances new perspectives on cases in which consumers' personal information is involved in the exchange, recognizing the inevitable interaction between EU competition law, the interests and protection of consumers and personal data protection. It suggests that the status quo under competition law is unsatisfactorily short sighted and that the EU should take a holistic approach (including information markets) to the analysis of competition law, reflecting consumer protection and fundamental rights aspects in the assessment.

This 2005 text explores the implications of a bargaining perspective for institutional governance and public law in deregulated industries such as electric power and telecommunications. Leading media accounts blame deregulated markets for failures in competitive restructuring policies. However, the author argues that governmental institutions, often influenced by private stakeholders, share blame for the defects in deregulated markets. The first part of the book explores the minimal role that judicial intervention played for much of the twentieth century in public utility industries and how deregulation presents fresh opportunities and challenges for public law. The second part of the book explores the role of public law in a deregulatory environment, focusing on the positive and negative incentives it creates for the behavior of private stakeholders and public institutions in a bargaining-focused political process.

Developing countries comprise the majority of the membership of the World Trade Organization. Many developing countries believe that the welfare gains that were supposed to ensue from the establishment of the WTO and the results of the Uruguay Round remain largely elusive. Though often aggregated under the ubiquitous banner developing countries, their multilateral trade objectives -- like their underlying policy interests and the concerns -- vary considerably from country to country and are by no means homogenous. Coming off the heels of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the ongoing Doha Development Round, launched in that Middle Eastern city in the fall of 2001 and now on life support so to speak, was inaugurated with much fanfare as a means of addressing the difficulties that developing countries face within the multilateral trading system. Special and differential treatment provisions in the WTO agreement in particular are the focus of much discussion in the ongoing round, and voices for change have been multiplying, due to widespread dissatisfaction with their effectiveness, enforceability, and implementation.

Most of the world s redundant ships are scrapped on the beaches of the Indian sub-continent, largely by hand. As well as cargo residues and wastes, ships contain high levels of hazardous materials that are released into the surrounding ecology when scrapped. The scrapping process is labour-intensive and largely manual; injuries and death are commonplace.

Ship breaking was a relatively obscure industry until the late 1990s. In just 12 years, action by environmental NGOs has led to the ratification of an international treaty targeting the extensive harm to human and environmental health arising from this heavy, polluting industry; it has also produced important case law.

Attempts to regulate the industry via the "Basel Convention" have resulted in a strong polarization of opinion as to its applicability and various international guidelines have also failed because of their voluntary nature. The adoption of the "Hong Kong Convention" in 2009 was a serious attempt to introduce international controls to this industry."

The linkages between WTO rules governing trade and energy security with a certain degree of focus on India are the main subject of this book. The edited volume brings together the views of academics, policymakers and experts with extensive experience covering WTO and international trade issues. The issues examined include mapping the linkages between trade and energy security in the WTO agreements, case law, accession and Doha negotiations; assessing the issues that could be raised by energy deficit or energy surplus countries at the WTO; analyzing the provisions of the ECT and NAFTA vis-a-vis the Indian policy framework and examining the trade regimes of selected OPEC members and other major suppliers of fossil fuels to India. While the Indian perspective is evident in the contributions, this book will also be of interest to an international audience, as trade, the WTO and energy security are global concerns and of relevance to all practitioners and academics working on these issues."

Much of international law, like much of contract, is enforced not by independent sanctions but rather through cooperative interaction among the parties, with repeat dealings, reputation, and a preference for reciprocity doing most of the enforcement work. Originally published in 2006, The Limits of Leviathan identifies areas in international law where formal enforcement provides the most promising means of promoting cooperation and where it does not. In particular, it looks at the International Criminal Court, the rules for world trade, efforts to enlist domestic courts to enforce orders of the International Court of Justice, domestic judicial enforcement of the Geneva Convention, the domain of international commercial agreements, and the question of odious debt incurred by sovereigns. This book explains how international law, like contract, depends largely on the willingness of responsible parties to make commitments.

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."

A breach of fair and equitable treatment is alleged in almost every investor-state dispute. It has therefore become a controversial norm, which touches many questions at the heart of general international law. In this book, Roland Klager sheds light on these controversies by exploring the deeper doctrinal foundations of fair and equitable treatment and reviewing its contentious relationship with the international minimum standard. The norm is also discussed in light of the fragmentation of international law, theories of international justice and rational balancing, and the idea of constitutionalism in international law. In this vein, a shift in the way of addressing fair and equitable treatment is proposed by focusing on the process of justificatory reasoning.

This book brings together the 2009 output of the American Law Institute (ALI) project on World Trade Organization Law. Each chapter focuses on a different dispute from the adjudicating bodies of the WTO. Each case is jointly evaluated by well known experts in trade law and international economics. ALI reporters critically review the jurisprudence of WTO adjudicating bodies and evaluate whether the ruling 'makes sense' from an economic as well as a legal point of view, and, if not, whether the problem lies in the interpretation of the law or the law itself. The studies do not always cover all issues discussed in a case, but they seek to discuss both the procedural and the substantive issues that form, in the reporters' views, the 'core' of the dispute. This paperback will be an invaluable resource for students, lecturers and practitioners of international trade law.

This analysis of how multi-level networked governance has superseded the liberal system of interdependent states focuses on the role of law in mediating power and shows how lawyers have shaped the main features of capitalism, especially the transnational corporation. It covers the main institutions regulating the world economy, including the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and a myriad of other bodies, and introduces the reader to key regulatory arenas: corporate governance, competition policy, investment protection, anti-corruption rules, corporate codes and corporate liability, international taxation, avoidance and evasion and the campaign to combat them, the offshore finance system, international financial regulation and its contribution to the financial crisis, trade rules and their interaction with standards especially for food safety and environmental protection, the regulation of key services (telecommunications and finance), intellectual property and the tensions between exclusive private rights and emergent forms of common and collective property in knowledge.

Like many other international organizations, the World Trade Organization stands at a crossroads. There is an obvious imbalance between the organization's dispute settlement arm and its negotiation platform. While its current rules, supported by a strong dispute settlement system, have provided some buffering against the negative effects of the financial crises, its negotiation machinery has not produced any substantial outcomes since the late 1990s. It has become obvious that the old way of doing business does not work any more and fresh ideas about governing the organization are needed. Based on rigorous scholarship, this volume of essays offers critical readings on the functioning of the system and provides policy-relevant ideas that go beyond incremental redesign but avoid the trap of romantic scenarios.

Originally an important but relatively obscure plurilateral instrument, the WTO Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA) is now becoming a pillar of the WTO system as a result of important developments since the Uruguay Round. This collection examines the issues and challenges that this raises for the GPA, as well as future prospects for addressing government procurement at a multilateral level. Coverage includes issues relating to pending accessions to the GPA, particularly those of developing countries with a large state sector such as China; the revised (provisionally agreed) GPA text of 2006, including provisions on electronic procurement and Special and Differential Treatment for Developing Countries; and procurement provisions in regional trade agreements and their significance for the multilateral system. Attention is also given to emerging issues, especially those concerning environmental, social and SME policy; competition law; and the implications of the recent economic crisis.

The Commission of the European Union has identified divergences between the national contract laws of the Member States as an obstacle to the completion of the European Internal Market and put this issue on its highest political agenda. Alexander J. Wulf analyses and predicts the effects. The study is situated in the context of the recent developments in the discussion on European contract law. The book begins with an introduction to the economic and legal theories that serve as the rationale for the development of the line of argument. These theories are then applied to the issues involved in the current controversy on European contract law. The author develops a model that he uses to analyze the institutional processes of European contract law. Empirical data are employed to test this model and discuss the results. From his analysis the author develops criteria that can serve as a starting point for thinking about the economic desirability of an optional European contract law."

The Energy Charter Treaty has come of age, with almost 50 States parties and a small but growing body of arbitral case law. In this new study of the Treaty's investment protection provisions, Thomas Roe and Matthew Happold set out to identify and explain the Treaty's principal provisions and to suggest answers to some of the difficult problems thrown up by its drafting. They discuss in detail questions such as the standards of protection granted by the Treaty and the international responsibility of States for breaches of the Treaty, the various procedures available for the vindication of rights under the Treaty and the conditions to be satisfied before a claimant's complaint may be considered on the merits. Specific issues addressed include the impact of EU law on claims under the Treaty and the Treaty's provisions concerning taxation.

Numerous international legal regimes now seek to address the global depletion of fish stocks, and increasingly their activities overlap. The relevant laws were developed at different times by different groups of states. They are motivated by divergent economic approaches, influenced by disparate non-state actors, and implemented by separate institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Margaret Young shows how these and other factors affect the interaction between regimes. Her empirical and doctrinal analysis moves beyond the discussion of conflicting norms that has dominated the fragmentation debate. Case-studies include the negotiation of new rules on fisheries subsidies, the restriction of trade in endangered marine species and the adjudication of fisheries import bans. She explores how regimes should interact, in fisheries governance and beyond, to offer insights into the practice and legitimacy of regime interaction in international law.

For a long time, the GATT led a life of its own as a self-contained regime. The evolution from tariff to non-tariff barriers brought about increasing overlaps with other regulatory areas. WTO rules increasingly interface with other areas of law and policy, including environmental protection, agricultural policies, labour standards, investment, human rights and regional integration. Against this backdrop, this book examines fragmentation in international trade regulation across a wide array of regulatory fields. To this end, it uses a conceptually coherent theoretical framework which is based on the effort to bring about greater coherence among different policy goals and fields, and thus to embed the multilateral trading system within the broader framework of international economics, law and relations. It will appeal to those interested in a forward-looking discussion of the most pressing issues of the international trade agenda.

This book provides a comprehensive review of the Measures for Administration of Takeover of Chinese Listed Companies (the Chinese takeover law), with emphasis on the differences between the Chinese takeover law and takeover legislation in the UK, the US and Hong Kong. The Chinese M&A market has been booming at an unprecedented rate in recent years; not only domestic investors, but also foreign funds and multinational companies are actively participating on the market. For both market participants and researchers, it is crucial to understand the emerging and transitional aspects of the Chinese economy and its M&A market, and the impacts of those aspects on relevant laws. While there are ongoing academic discussions on the convergence between the Chinese takeover law and its counterparts in the UK, Hong Kong and the US, this book offers a comprehensive discussion of the divergence and focuses on key differences in the transplanted Chinese takeover law.

This publication provides an unparalleled comparative analysis of two "hot topics" in the field of antitrust and unfair competition laws with regard to a number of key countries.

The first part of the book examines whether small and middle-sized businesses could or should be subject to specific competition rules. These businesses account for 99% of the enterprises in Europe and the United States, making this a particularly important topic. The papers consider both the public and private enforcement rules across a range of jurisdictions and a detailed international report, prepared by Michele Carpagnano, identifies general trends and highlights differences and the most interesting features of national regulations.

The second part of the book gathers contributions from various jurisdictions on the unfair competition question of whether a company could or should be protected against the use of their trademark, distinctive signs and other components of their image and identity on the part of non-competing companies. The papers focus on the fundamental issue of the competitive relationship as a condition of protection under unfair competition acts and the connection to intellectual property protection. The comprehensive and insightful international report, prepared by Martine Karsenty-Ricard, brings together these reflections by comparing various national positions.

The book also includes the resolutions passed by the General Assembly of the LIDC following a debate on each of these topics, which include proposed solutions and recommendations. The International League of Competition Law (LIDC) is a long-standing international association that focuses on the interface between competition law and intellectual property law, including unfair competition issues.

This book is the first study to examine the issue of the legality of parallel imports of trademarked goods under the most important legal systems on an international level, namely under GATT/WTO law, EU law and the laws of the ten major trading partners of the European Union. Part I consists of a general approach to the phenomenon of parallel importation and of a presentation of the theories that have been suggested to resolve the above-mentioned issue. The rule of exhaustion of rights, of which there are three types (rule of national, regional and international exhaustion of rights), is proposed as the most effective instrument to deal with the issue in question. Part II examines the question of exhaustion of trademark rights in light of the provisions of GATT/WTO Law. Part III analyzes the elements of the EU provisions on exhaustion of trademark rights (Articles 7 of Directive 2008/95/EC and 13 of Regulation (EC) 207/2009) and some specific issues relating to the application of these provisions. Part IV presents the regimes of exhaustion of trademark rights recognized in the European Union's current ten most significant trading partners. The book is the first legal study to welcome, in light of economic analysis, the approach adopted by GATT/WTO law and EU law to the question of the geographical scope of the exhaustion of the trademark rights rule. It includes all the case law developed on an international level on the issue of the legality of parallel imports of trademarked goods and a comprehensive overview of the scientific literature concerning the phenomenon of parallel imports in general and the legality of parallel imports of trademarked goods. All the views expressed in the book are based on the European Court of Justice's most recent case law and that of the courts of the most important trading partners of the European Union.

One of the primary functions of law is to ensure that the legal structure governing all social relations is predictable, coherent, consistent and applicable. Taken together, these characteristics of law are referred to as legal certainty. In traditional approaches to legal certainty, law is regarded as a hierarchical system of rules characterized by stability, clarity, uniformity, calculable enforcement, publicity and predictability. However, the current reality is that national legal systems no longer operate in isolation, but within a multilevel legal order, wherein norms created at both the international and regional level are directly applicable to national legal systems. Also, norm creation is no longer the exclusive prerogative of public officials of the state: private actors have an increasing influence on norm creation as well. Social scientists have referred to this phenomenon of interacting and overlapping competences as multilevel governance. Only recently have legal scholars focused attention on the increasing interconnectedness (and therefore the concomitant loss of primacy of national legal orders) between the global, European and national regulatory spheres through the concept of multilevel regulation.

In this project the author uses multilevel regulation as a term to characterize a regulatory space in which the process of rule making, rule enforcement and rule adjudication (the regulatory lifecycle) is dispersed across more than one administrative or territorial level and amongst several different actors, both public and private. The author draws on the concept of a regulatory space, using it as a framing device to differentiate between specific aspects of policy fields. The relationship between actors in such a space is non-hierarchical and they may be independent of each other. The lack of central ordering of the regulatory lifecycle within this regulatory space is the most important feature of such a space. The implications of multilevel regulation for the notion of legal certainty have attracted limited attention from scholars and the demand for legal certainty in regulatory practice is still a puzzle. The book explores the idea of legal certainty in terms of the perceptions and expectations of regulatees in the context of medical products - specifically, pharmaceuticals and medical devices, which can be differentiated as two regulatory spaces and therefore form two case studies. As an exploratory project, the book necessarily explores new territory in terms of investigating legal certainty first in terms of regulatee perceptions and expectations and second, because it studies it in the context of multilevel regulation.

Farm support is contentious in international negotiations. This in-depth assessment of the legal compliance and economic evaluation issues raised by the WTO Agreement on Agriculture presents consistent support data and forward-looking projections for eight developed and developing countries (EU, US, Japan, Norway, Brazil, China, India, Philippines), using original estimates where official notifications are not available. Variations over time in notified support in some cases reflect real policy changes; others merely reflect shifts in how countries represent their measures. The stalled Doha negotiations presage significantly tighter constraints for developed countries that provide the highest support, but loopholes will persist. Developing countries face fewer constraints and their trade-distorting farm support can rise. Pressure points and key remaining issues if a Doha agreement is reached are evaluated. Vigilant monitoring for compliance of farm support with WTO commitments will be required to lessen its negative consequences whether or not the Doha Round is concluded.

This volume assembles a stellar group of scholars and experts to examine preferential trade agreements (PTAs), a topic that has time and again attracted the interest of analysts. It presents a discussion of the evolving economic analysis regarding PTAs and the various dysfunctions that continually place them among the priority items for (re)negotiation by the WTO. The book explores recent empirical research that casts doubt on the old 'trade diversion' school and debates why the WTO should deal with PTAs and if PTAs belong under the mandate of the WTO as we now know it.

How do politics and international economic law interact with each other? Financial crises and shifts in global economic patterns have refocused our attention on how the fingerprints of the visible hand can be seen all over the institutions that underpin the rules of globalization. From trade and investment to finance, governments are under pressure to enforce, resist, and re-write international economic law. Lawyers have seldom given enough attention to the influence of politics on law, whereas political scientists have had an on-again, off-again fascination with how the law influences relations among states. This book leads the way toward filling this interdisciplinary gap, through a series of important studies written by leaders in the field on specific problems in international economic relations. The book demonstrates a variety of ways in which the international political-economic nexus may be researched and understood.

This book was the first in a groundbreaking series of annual volumes utilized in the development of an American Law Institute (ALI) project on World Trade Organization Law. The project undertakes yearly analysis of the case law from the adjudicating bodies of the WTO. The Reporters' Studies for 2001 cover a wide range of WTO law ranging from classic trade in goods issues to intellectual property protection. Each of the cases is jointly evaluated by an economist and a lawyer, both well-known experts in the field of trade law or international economics. The Reporters critically review the jurisprudence of WTO adjudicating bodies and attempt to evaluate whether the ruling 'makes sense' from an economic as well as a legal point of view, and, if not, whether the problem lies in the interpretation of the law or the law itself. The Studies do not always cover all issues discussed in a case, but they seek to discuss both the procedural and the substantive issues that form the 'core' of the dispute.