Modern investment treaties give private arbitrators power to determine whether governments should pay compensation to foreign investors for a wide range of sovereign acts. In recent years, particularly developing countries have incurred significant liabilities from investment treaty arbitration, which begs the question why they signed the treaties in the first place. Through a comprehensive and timely analysis, this book shows that governments in developing countries typically overestimated the economic benefits of investment treaties and practically ignored their risks. Rooted in insights on bounded rationality from behavioural psychology and economics, the analysis highlights how policy-makers often relied on inferential shortcuts when assessing the implications of the treaties, which resulted in systematic deviations from fully rational behaviour. This not only sheds new light on one of the most controversial legal regimes underwriting economic globalization but also provides a novel theoretical account of the often irrational, yet predictable, nature of economic diplomacy.

The general exception clauses of the TRIPS Agreement of the World Trade Organization permit exceptions to copyrights and to the rights conferred by trademarks, industrial designs and patents. These clauses are intended to facilitate access to diverse forms of proprietary knowledge and therefore foster the interdependent pillars of sustainable development: economic progress, realization of human rights and the conservation of the environment. In this book, Edson Beas Rodrigues, Jr argues that the TRIPS Agreement, in its current configuration, does not hinder the establishment of exceptions to intellectual property rights, devised to promote vital socioeconomic interests such as the freedom to carry out creative and inventive activities, freedom of expression, the strengthening of free competition, and increased access to educational materials by underprivileged students and to technical knowledge for humanitarian purposes.

The development of new digital technologies has resulted in significant transformations in daily life, from the arrival of online shopping to more fundamental changes in the ways we work and communicate. Many of these changes raise questions that transcend market access and liberalisation, and demand cooperation and coherent regulatory design. International trade regulation has hitherto not reacted in a forward-looking manner to the digital revolution and, particularly at the multilateral level, legal engineering has yielded few tangible results. This book examines whether WTO laws possess the necessary flexibility and resilience to accommodate the changes brought about by burgeoning digital trade. By revealing both the potential and the limitations of the WTO framework, it provides a broad picture of the interaction between digital technologies and trade regulation, links the often disconnected discourses of international trade law, intellectual property and cyberlaw and explores discrete problems in different domains of global trade regulation.

Conflicts between foreign investment law and environmental law are becoming increasingly frequent. On the one hand, the rise of environmental regulation poses significant challenges to foreign investors in several industries. On the other, the surge in investment arbitration proceedings is making States aware of the important litigation risks that may result from the adoption of environmental regulation. This study of the relationship between these two areas of law adopts both a policy and a practical perspective. It identifies the major challenges facing States, foreign investors and their legal advisers as a result of the potential friction between investment law and environmental law and provides a detailed analysis of all the major legal issues on the basis of a comprehensive study of the jurisprudence from investment tribunals, human rights courts and bodies, the ICJ, the WTO, the ITLOS, the CJEU and other adjudication mechanisms.

The enormous economic power of the People's Republic of China makes it one of the most important actors in the international system. Since China's accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, all fields of international economic law have been impacted by greater Chinese participation. Now, just over one decade later, the question remains as to whether China's unique characteristics make its engagement fundamentally different from that of other players. In this volume, well-known scholars from outside China consider the country's approach to international economic law. In addition to the usual foci of trade and investment, the authors also consider monetary law, finance, competition law, and intellectual property. What emerges is a rare portrait of China's strategy across the full spectrum of international economic activity.

Gary Chartier elaborates a particular version of economic justice rooted in the natural law tradition, explaining how it is relevant to economic issues and developing natural law accounts of property, work, and economic security. He examines a range of case studies related to ownership, production, distribution, and consumption, using natural law theory as a basis for staking positions on a number of contested issues related to economic life and highlighting the potentially progressive and emancipatory dimension of natural law theory.

Exploring in depth the institutions that underpin the global economy, this study provides invaluable insights into why a minimum economic order has endured for so long and why states are unwilling to establish a maximum order, a global safety net for all. The author investigates how debt, a critical component of states' economic infrastructure, leads to debilitating crises, and how these crises undermine the economic autonomy and political independence of states. A must read for those who wish to understand how the world economic order operates and impacts the well-being of individuals and entire populations, this book is indispensable for professionals and students in the fields of law, political sciences and international relations and those who seek to understand why economic peace is, in many cases, beyond our reach.

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have been proliferating for more than two decades, with the negotiations for a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and a Trans-Pacific Partnership being just the tip of the iceberg. This volume addresses some of the most pressing issues related to the surge of these agreements. It includes chapters written by leading political scientists, economists and lawyers which theoretically and empirically advance our understanding of trade agreements. The key theme is that PTAs vary widely in terms of design. The authors provide explanations as to why we see these differences in design and whether and how these differences matter in practice. The tools for understanding the purposes and effects of PTAs that are offered will guide future research and inform practitioners and trade policy experts about progress in the scientific enquiry into PTAs.

Despite being an important legal instrument in the law of the WTO, the waiver has hitherto been the subject of little scholarly analysis. Isabel Feichtner fills this gap by challenging the conventional view that the WTO's political bodies do not engage in significant law-making. She systemises the GATT and WTO waiver practice and suggests a typology of waivers as individual exception, general exception and rule-making instruments. She also presents the procedural and substantive legal requirements for the granting of waivers, deals with questions of judicial review and interpretation of waiver decisions, and clarifies the waiver's potential and limits for addressing the need for flexibility and adaptability in public international law and WTO law in particular. By connecting the analysis of waiver competence and waiver practice to the general stability/flexibility challenge in public international law, the book sheds new light on the WTO, international institutions and international law.

This book analyses the role of international organizations in WTO dispute settlement as arising from a number of WTO disputes. In particular, the roles of the IMF, WIPO, WCO and WHO are addressed. The use of the Vienna Convention rules of interpretation framework allows an evaluation of the weight attributed to this material by the WTO adjudicator. This allows specific conclusions to be drawn regarding the level of institutional sensitivity of the WTO adjudicator to each of the organizations. As well as being a valuable source of research, the analysis will appeal to international law scholars, civil servants and law practitioners interested in the WTO and dispute settlement.

Does public service liberalization pose a threat to gender and human rights? Traditionally considered essential services provided by a state to its citizens, public services are often viewed as public goods which embody social values. Subjecting them to market ideology thus raises concerns that the intrinsic social nature of these services will be negated. Moreover, as those most likely to be reliant on public services, public service liberalization may also further marginalize women. Nevertheless, states continue to increasingly liberalize public services. Barnali Choudhury explores the implications of public service liberalization. Using primarily a legal approach, but drawing from case studies, empirical research and gender theories, she examines whether liberalization under the General Agreement on Trade in Services and other liberalization vehicles such as preferential trade and investment agreements compromise human rights and gender objectives.

This comparison of EU and WTO approaches to common trade-liberalisation challenges brings together eighteen authors from Europe and America. Together they explore fundamental legal issues, such as the role of general principles of law, the role of the judiciary in the development of law, the effect of the principle of non-discrimination and the elimination of non-discriminatory barriers to trade. The contributions also examine the most recent developments in trade law across a full range of trade issues, including TBT and SPS, services, intellectual property, customs rules, safeguards, anti-dumping and government procurement. Adopting a comparative perspective throughout, this volume sheds light on today's trade law and suggests paths forward for each system through the perennial tensions between open, non-discriminatory trade and strongly held national values and objectives.

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.

The legitimacy of the WTO's decision-making process has always been questioned, and many have advocated public participation mechanisms as a remedy. Yves Bonzon considers the limits and potential of these mechanisms by advancing a conceptual framework which distinguishes the four 'implementation parameters' of public participation: the goal, the object, the modalities, and the actors. He addresses the issue of legitimacy by considering to what extent, and by virtue of which legal developments, one can see implementing the democratic principle as a goal for public participation in the context of the WTO. By analysing the institutional structure of the WTO and its different types of decisions, he then outlines how this goal should influence the object and modalities of public participation, which decision-making procedures should be opened to public participation, and how the mechanisms should be implemented in practice. Finally, he suggests specific amendments to existing WTO arrangements on public participation.

This book explores the emergence of a new developmental state in Latin America and its significance for law and development theory. In Brazil since 2000, emerging forms of state activism, including a new industrial policy and a robust social policy, differ from both classic developmental state and neoliberal approaches. They favor a strong state and a strong market, employ public-private partnerships, seek to reduce inequality, and embrace the global economy. Case studies of state activism and law in Brazil show new roles emerging for legal institutions. They describe how the national development bank uses law in innovation promotion, trade law strengthens new developmental policies in export promotion and public health, and social law frames innovative poverty-relief programs that reduce inequality and stimulate demand. Contrasting Brazilian experience with Colombia and Mexico, the book underscores the unique features of Brazil's trajectory and the importance of this experience for understanding the role of law in development today.

Since the beginnings of the GATT and the Bretton Woods institutions, and on to the creation of the WTO, states have continued to develop institutions and legal infrastructure to promote global interdependence. International economic law, a field dominated by legal regimes to liberalize international trade but that also includes international financial law and international law relating to economic development, has become a dense web of treaty commitments at the multilateral, regional, and bilateral levels. International lawyers are experts in understanding how these institutions operate in practice, but they tend to uncritically accept comparative advantage as the principal normative criterion to justify these institutions. In contrast, moral and political philosophers have developed accounts of global justice, but these accounts have had relatively little influence on international legal scholarship and on institutional design. What is needed is a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the economic fairness problems that societies face as they become increasingly interdependent, and the solutions that international economic law and institutions might facilitate. This volume reflects the results of a symposium held at Tillar House, the American Society of International Law headquarters in Washington, DC, in November 2008, which brought together philosophers, legal scholars, and economists to discuss the problems of understanding international economic law from the standpoints of rights and justice, in particular from the standpoint of distributive justice.

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.

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.

Does the WTO leave appropriate policy space to its Members to pursue legitimate objectives, such as the economic development of developing countries, the conversion to a greener economy, or recovery in times of a global economic downturn? This legal and normative analysis of the WTO rules on subsidies and countervailing measures sheds light on why governments resort to subsidization and, by tracing the historical origins of the SCM Agreement and the Agreement on Agriculture, on why they have been willing to gradually confine their policy space. This sets the stage for a systematic and comprehensive legal analysis of both agreements, which integrates the vast amount of case law and proposals tabled in the Doha round. A separate case study explores the complex rules on export credit support, and the book closes with an in-depth normative assessment of these WTO rules on subsidies and countervailing measures.

In this reissued edition of the classic work Developing Countries in the GATT Legal System, Robert E. Hudec's clear insight on the situation of developing countries within the international trade system is once again made available. Hudec is regarded as one of the most prominent commentators on the evolution of the current international trade regime, and this long out-of-print book offers his analysis of the dynamics playing out between developed and developing nations. A significant contribution when the book was first published, this work continues to serve as a thoughtful and important guide to how current and future trade policy must seriously adapt to the demands of the developing world. This new edition includes a new introduction by J. Michael Finger that examines Hudec's work to understand how the GATT got into its current historical-institutional predicament and the lasting impact of his work on current research on international trade systems.

Economic diplomacy is changing. The multilateral organizations that dominated the last half of the twentieth century no longer monopolize economic affairs. Instead, countries are resorting to more modest 'minilateral' strategies like trade alliances, informal 'soft law' agreements, and financial engineering to manage the global economy. Like traditional modes of economic statecraft, these tools are aimed at both liberalizing and supervising international financial policy in a world of diverse national interests. But unlike before, they are specifically tailored to navigating a post-American (and post-Western) world where economic power is more diffuse than ever before. This book explains how these strategies work and reveals how this new diplomatic toolbox will reshape how countries do business with one another for decades to come.

'As business spreads across the world, but jurisdictions remain essentially national, means must be found whereby business may effectively regulate itself and be regulated for public benefit. This important book addresses these issues, at theoretical and practical levels, explaining important sectoral examples and with deeper analysis. It is both timely and important, and provokes ideas for actions that should be taken at both transnational and national levels. The range of issues covered is rich and impressive.' - Christopher Hodges, Oxford University, UK and Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands 'Globalization pushes the boundaries of markets. Alongside the greater ''goods'' of transnational economic activity come the ''bads'' of unregulated conduct. This important book looks to the new frontiers of legal intervention to make sure that global markets do not run riot over important public values. The signal contribution is not the search for ever higher levels of transnational authority - the superstates of a brave new world - but empowering numerous private actors to enforce legal norms in our fast-changing economic environment.' - Samuel Issacharoff, New York University, School of Law, US This book addresses the different mechanisms of enforcement deployed in transnational private regimes vis-a-vis those in the field of public transnational law. Enforcement represents a key dimension in measuring the effectiveness and legitimacy of transnational private regulation. This detailed book shifts the focus from rule-making to enforcement and compliance, and moves from a vertical analysis to a comparative sectoral analysis. Both public and private transnational regulation fall under the scrutiny of the authors, and the book considers the effectiveness of judicial models of enforcement - under international law and through national courts - and of non-judicial means. Comparisons are drawn across sectors including international commercial law, labor law, finance, Internet regulation and advertising. Enforcement of Transnational Regulation will appeal to scholars of both private and public law, regulation and comparative law. It will also prove a stimulating and challenging read for policy makers and law makers. Contributors: E. Benvenisti, F. Cafaggi, F. Casarosa, S. Cassese, E. D'Alterio, K.E. Davis, M. De Bellis, G.W. Downs, C. Estlund, F. Francioni, G.P. Miller, E.-U. Petersmann, C. Scott, R. Stewart, P. Verbruggen

Domestic regulation of services sectors has a significant impact on services trade liberalization, which is why General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) disciplines are negotiated in the WTO. With the help of analyses and case-studies from academics, regulators and trade experts, this book explores the scope and limits of WTO legal principles to promote domestic regulatory reform. Case-studies discuss country-specific challenges and experiences of regulating important service sectors, such as finance, telecommunications, distribution, legal, education, health, postal and logistics services, as well as the role of regulatory impact assessments. The findings will interest trade officials, policy-makers, regulators, think tanks and businesses concerned with the implications of domestic regulation on access to services markets, and with the opportunities for formulating trade disciplines in this area. It is also a useful resource for academics and students researching regulatory approaches and practices in services sectors.

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 only authorized paginated reports in English. As such, they are an essential addition to the library of every practising and academic trade lawyer, and will be widely consulted by students taking courses in international economic or trade law. The WTO authorized printed DSR volumes commenced publication with DSR, 1996: I. Publication of the Cambridge printed edition follows the WTO website publication of all new reports, which will continue in the three working languages of English, French and Spanish. Once a report has been released on the WTO website it will be published in the next Cambridge printed volume

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 only authorized paginated reports in English. As such, they are an essential addition to the library of every practising and academic trade lawyer, and will be widely consulted by students taking courses in international economic or trade law. The WTO authorized printed DSR volumes commenced publication with DSR, 1996: I. Publication of the Cambridge printed edition follows the WTO website publication of all new reports, which will continue in the three working languages of English, French and Spanish. Once a report has been released on the WTO website it will be published in the next Cambridge printed volume