This manuscript examines Sino-Middle Eastern relations on a bilateral level. It highlights the depth of China's involvement in Central Asia with each country on a five dimensional approach: security cooperation, energy security, trade relations, political relations, and cultural relations. Regarding each of these criteria, Central Asia enjoys a strategic significance to China's national security, vital interests, territorial integrity, sovereignty, regime survival, and economic prosperity. China has been an integral part of the political developments on the Central Asian political scene for over the past two millennia. Their bilateral ties grew steadily since the independence of Central Asian republics in 1992, culminating into strategic partnership two decades later. China and its partners in the region have embarked on the construction of the most ambitious gas pipelines network, joint ventures in oil upstreaming and downstreaming, mammoth highway and railroad projects, trade zones, construction projects, and above all, strategic security coordination in reference to unified and an integrated response to regional security threats. Both sides are also engaged in a process of revival of the Silk Road in terms of its cultural diversity and trade relations. Sino-Central Asian volume of trade reached $50 billion heading steadily toward $100 in the coming five years.

The American Century began in 1941 and ended on January 20, 2017. While the United States remains a military giant and is still an economic powerhouse, it no longer dominates the world economy or geopolitics as it once did. The current turn toward nationalism and "America first" unilateralism in foreign policy will not make America great. Instead, it represents the abdication of our responsibilities in the face of severe environmental threats, political upheaval, mass migration, and other global challenges. In this incisive and forceful book, Jeffrey D. Sachs provides the blueprint for a new foreign policy that embraces global cooperation, international law, and aspirations for worldwide prosperity-not nationalism and gauzy dreams of past glory. He argues that America's approach to the world must shift from military might and wars of choice to a commitment to shared objectives of sustainable development. Our pursuit of primacy has embroiled us in unwise and unwinnable wars, and it is time to shift from making war to making peace and time to embrace the opportunities that international cooperation offers. A New Foreign Policy explores both the danger of the "America first" mindset and the possibilities for a new way forward, proposing timely and achievable plans to foster global economic growth, reconfigure the United Nations for the twenty-first century, and build a multipolar world that is prosperous, peaceful, fair, and resilient.

Fresh water resources are at the same time ecological, economic, social, and cultural goods and must be managed accordingly. However, efforts to manage these resources are complicated by tensions arising from possible clashes between the regimes favouring privatization, trade and investment liberalization, and domestic and international regimes governing water resources, environmental protection and human rights. The relationships between the international economic and legal framework on the one hand and fresh water resource management and protection on the other, are complex and multifaceted. This book addresses the key interdisciplinary issues that increasingly confront policy makers, tribunals, arbitration bodies and other institutions. It focuses primarily on law, but also includes perspectives from economics, political science and other disciplines. It examines such questions as are governments free to decide whether or not to export water resources? Can foreign investors sue host states for adopting measures to control water pollution? Can international trade rules be used to reduce or eliminate water related subsidies? Do rules on the liberalization of water services affect domestic and international human rights obligations relating to water supply? More generally, how do the procedural rights of states, individuals, affected communities and investors affect decisions regarding the right to drinking water, the rights of investors to exploit water resources, and the rights of governments to protect their lakes, rivers and groundwater?

How do we measure and truly grasp the sweeping social and environmental effects of an oil-based economy? Focusing on the special economic zones resulting from China's trading partnership with Nigeria, Enclaves of Exception offers a new approach to exploring the relationship between oil and technologies of extraction and their interrelatedness to local livelihoods and environmental practices. In this groundbreaking work, Omolade Adunbi argues that even though the exploitation of oil resources is dominated by big corporations, it establishes opportunities for many former Nigerian insurgents and their local communities to contest the ownership of such resources in the oil-rich Niger Delta and to extract oil themselves and sell it. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Enclaves of Exception makes clear that, although both the free trade zones and the now booming local artisanal refineries share the goals of profit-making and are enthusiastically supported by those benefiting from them economically, they have yielded dramatically the same environmental outcome for communities around them that included pollution with precarious effects on the health of the populations in the regions, and displacement of population from their livelihood practices.

How do we measure and truly grasp the sweeping social and environmental effects of an oil-based economy? Focusing on the special economic zones resulting from China's trading partnership with Nigeria, Enclaves of Exception offers a new approach to exploring the relationship between oil and technologies of extraction and their interrelatedness to local livelihoods and environmental practices. In this groundbreaking work, Omolade Adunbi argues that even though the exploitation of oil resources is dominated by big corporations, it establishes opportunities for many former Nigerian insurgents and their local communities to contest the ownership of such resources in the oil-rich Niger Delta and to extract oil themselves and sell it. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Enclaves of Exception makes clear that, although both the free trade zones and the now booming local artisanal refineries share the goals of profit-making and are enthusiastically supported by those benefiting from them economically, they have yielded dramatically the same environmental outcome for communities around them that included pollution with precarious effects on the health of the populations in the regions, and displacement of population from their livelihood practices.

The first East Asia Summit in 2005 prompted discussions of enlargement of ASEAN free trade agreements to include all major trading blocs and their regional and global implications. In this timely and original study, Tran Van Hoa and Charles Harvie explore the likely effects of new regional development. With more than half of the world's consumption and production market, well-defined trade agreements in Asia remain crucial to the economic growth and stability of the area. This book contains scholarly and well-researched contributions from internationally renowned experts from ASEAN, East and South Asia and Oceania who discuss this major new development and its impact on trade, investment, services, development, industry, poverty and economic relations. An important collection of new research, this volume will be used by economists, trade experts, academics, students, government advisers, policymakers and all those interested in these significant contemporary developments and their far-ranging implications in an enlarged Asia.

This book argues that investor risk in emerging markets hinges on the company a country keeps. When a country signs on to an economic agreement with states that are widely known to be stable, it looks less risky. Conversely, when a country joins a group with more unstable members, it looks more risky. Investors use the company a country keeps as a heuristic in evaluating that country's willingness to honor its sovereign debt obligations. This has important implications for the study of international cooperation as well as of sovereign risk and credibility at the domestic level.

The Japan-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPPA) of 2018 is the most far-reaching 'megaregional' economic agreement in force, with several major countries beyond its eleven negotiating countries also interested. Still bearing the stamp of the original US involvement before the Trump-era reversal, TPP is the first instance of 'megaregulation': a demanding combination of inter-state economic ordering and national regulatory governance on a highly ambitious substantive and trans-regional scale. Its text and ambition have influenced other negotiations ranging from the Japan-EU Agreement (JEEPA) and the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) to the projected Pan-Asian Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). This book provides an extensive analysis of TPP as a megaregulatory project for channelling and managing new pressures of globalization, and of core critical arguments made against economic megaregulation from standpoints of development, inequality, labour rights, environmental interests, corporate capture, and elite governance. Specialized chapters cover supply chains, digital economy, trade facilitation, intellectual property, currency levels, competition and state-owned enterprises, government procurement, investment, prescriptions for national regulation, and the TPP institutions. Country studies include detailed analyses of TPP-related politics and approaches in Japan, Mexico, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, and Thailand. Contributors include leading practitioners and scholars in law, economics, and political science. At a time when the WTO and other global-scale institutions are struggling with economic nationalism and geopolitics, and bilateral and regional agreements are pressed by public disagreement and incompatibility with digital and capital and value chain flows, the megaregional ambition of TPP is increasingly important as a precedent requiring the close scrutiny this book presents.

This is a story about governance in Mexico after the labor and environmental accordsOCocalled side agreementsOCothat accompanied the NAFTA treaty went into effect. These side agreements required member states to uphold and enforce their labor and environmental laws; though never codified, it was widely accepted that Mexico, in particular, had a problem with law enforcement.
"Side Effects" explores how differences in institutional design (of the side agreements) and domestic capacity (between the labor and environment sectors) influenced norm socialization in Mexico. It argues that the acceptance of rule-of-law norms in environmental governance can be attributed to participating institutions' independence from national control, their willingness to give citizens access, and the professionalization and technical capacity of domestic bureaucrats and civil society actors. Changes in labor governance have been hampered by union confederations, longstanding corruption, and a closed opportunity structure. Going beyond a simple accounting exercise of resources devoted to enforcing the law, this book comes to grips with how best to strengthen local capacity and promote pro-norm behaviorOCoadvances essential to the task of development and democratization.

For almost three decades, the European Union (EU) has adopted measures to regulate consumer transactions within the internal market created by the EU Treaties. Existing legislation is largely based on directives harmonizing aspects of national consumer laws. This "Brief" argues that a more appropriate approach for EU consumer law would be legislation in the form of a regulation which is applicable to cross-border transactions only. The author considers the constitutional constraints of the EU Treaties, before examining the case for a cross-border-only measure. He argues that the cross-border approach is preferable, because it would provide clearer benefits for consumers seeking to buy goods and services across borders, while not upsetting domestic law unnecessarily-in particular in the context of e-commerce, with implications for industry, policymaking, and regional development. The "Brief" concludes by suggesting that a successful EU measure on cross-border consumer transactions could create a template for global initiatives for transnational consumer law. "

Though industrialized countries are usually the ones indicted when environmental pollution is discussed, over the few last years the rate of emissions in developing countries has increased by a startling amount. The fallout from this increase is evidenced by the struggle of cities like Beijing to improve their air quality. Yet there also exist developing countries such as Thailand that have managed to limit their emissions to more tolerable levels, raising the question: why are some developing countries more willing or able to take care of their environment than others?

In this volume, Gabriele Spilker proposes two factors for the differences in developing countries' environmental performance: integration into the international system and domestic political institutions. Focusing on developing countries generally but also closely examining important global powers such as China and India, Spilker employs a rigorous quantitative analysis to demonstrate the importance of considering various aspects of the international system, in order to draw more comprehensive conclusions about how globalization affects environmental performance. She asserts that democratic political institutions can shield developing countries from the negative consequences of either trade or foreign direct investment. But at the same time, developing countries, by avoiding demanding commitments, are more likely to use environmental treaties as a cover than as a real plan of action.

Adding a new dimension to the existing body of research on environmental quality and commitment, Spilker convincingly demonstrates how international and domestic political factors interact to shape developing countries' ability and willingness to care for their natural environment.

Picking his way through Andean cocaine fields, Central American prisons, Colorado pot shops, and the online drug dens of the Dark Web, Tom Wainwright provides a fresh, innovative look into the drug trade and its 250 million customers. More than just an investigation of how drug cartels do business, Narconomics is also a blueprint for how to defeat them. How does a budding cartel boss succeed (and survive) in the 300 billion illegal drug business? By learning from the best, of course. From creating brand value to fine-tuning customer service, the folks running cartels have been attentive students of the strategy and tactics used by corporations such as Walmart, McDonald's, and Coca-Cola. And what can government learn to combat this scourge? By analyzing the cartels as companies, law enforcers might better understand how they work -- and stop throwing away 100 billion a year in a futile effort to win the war against this global, highly organized business. Your intrepid guide to the most exotic and brutal industry on earth is Tom Wainwright. Picking his way through Andean cocaine fields, Central American prisons, Colorado pot shops, and the online drug dens of the Dark Web, Wainwright provides a fresh, innovative look into the drug trade and its 250 million customers. The cast of characters includes Bin Laden, the Bolivian coca guide; Old Lin, the Salvadoran gang leader; Starboy, the millionaire New Zealand pill maker; and a cozy Mexican grandmother who cooks blueberry pancakes while plotting murder. Along with presidents, cops, and teenage hitmen, they explain such matters as the business purpose for head-to-toe tattoos, how gangs decide whether to compete or collude, and why cartels care a surprising amount about corporate social responsibility. More than just an investigation of how drug cartels do business, Narconomics is also a blueprint for how to defeat them.

Green Trade Agreements reviews and analyses the environmental provisions that have become an important characteristic of the growing number of bilateral and regional free trade agreements. This book examines the range of approaches to these environmental provisions, evaluates their effectiveness and suggests potential improvements to the process.

Key elements of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) deal with temporary labor mobility. Ideally, NAFTA status provisions should make the temporary movement of professionals easier across the border of all NAFTA countries. However, in the case of emerging sectors such as high technology and the creative industries, it is arguably not the case. Within the context of recent literature on cross-border trade, city regions, economic clusters, international labor mobility, and post-September 11 security measures, this book probes the dynamics of transitory immigration of 'knowledge-workers' between the North American west coast city regions of Vancouver, Seattle, and the greater San Francisco Bay and Silicon Valley area, namely, Cascadia. With particular attention given to the experiences and strategies of the high tech firms that must move highly skilled workers across the Canada-US border, this book draws from 80 in-depth interviews with Canadian and US immigration officials, immigration attorneys and executives and professional staff of new technology firms and Fortune 500 companies. It develops and presents new models towards the development of an innovation cross border region, and recommends new policy approaches. Ultimately, it explores whether or not the Canada-US border is an impediment to the development of cross-border high-tech clusters. This comprehensive book will serve as a critical resource for academics in geography; political science; international relations; global studies; economics; international business and law. It will also strongly appeal to practitioners such as professional immigration lawyers, corporate firms, and governmental policy makers alike.

"The first detailed historical account of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) negotiations, this book covers the genesis of the project in the early 1990s to its demise in late 2003. It examines how the FTAA, an Inter-American policy idea, was incompatible with the predominant ideas and beliefs of Brazilian and American decision makers as to how they could and should conduct their countries' foreign trade policy in the Western Hemisphere. Its multidisciplinary nature and the incorporation of a case study of foreign policymaking in an emerging economy make it attractive to scholars and students of Political Sciences and International Relations, and to all those interested in the power dynamics in asymmetrical relations"--

The prospective WTO Millennium Round of negotiations will highlight critical economic issues regarding the application and implementation of the WTO rules to international trade in goods and services. In this book, a distinguished group of academic experts considers the agenda and areas of interest for the next Round in light of Seattle, the functions of the WTO and competition policy issues arising from trade liberalization. This is followed by a focus on a wide range of WTO-specific economic issues and debates, including: state trading and state aids regional integration agriculture, including the EU-US banana dispute international investment patents financial services. Trade Liberalization, Competition and the WTO will be of interest to academics and policymakers as well as students of international economics and global trade reform.

Japan's challenges and opportunities in a new era of uncertainty. Henry Kissinger wrote a few years ago that Japan has been for seven decades "an important anchor of Asian stability and global peace and prosperity." However, Japan has only played this anchoring role within an American-led liberal international order built from the ashes of World War II. Now that order itself is under siege, not just from illiberal forces such as China and Russia but from its very core, the United States under Donald Trump. The already evident damage to that order, and even its possible collapse, pose particular challenges for Japan, as explored in this book. Noted experts survey the difficult position that Japan finds itself in, both abroad and at home. The weakening of the rules-based order threatens the very basis of Japan's trade-based prosperity, with the unreliability of U.S. protection leaving Japan vulnerable to an economic and technological superpower in China and at heightened risk from a nuclear North Korea. Japan's response to such challenges are complicated by controversies over constitutional revision and the dark aspects of its history that remain a source of tension with its neighbors. The absence of virulent strains of populism have helped to provide Japan with a stable platform from which to pursue its international agenda. Yet with a rapidly aging population, widening intergenerational inequality, and high levels of public debt, the sources of Japan's stability its welfare state and immigration policies are becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. Each of the book's chapters is written by a specialist in the field, and the book benefits from interviews with more than 40 Japanese policymakers and experts, as well as a public opinion survey. The book outlines today's challenges to the liberal international order, proposes a role for Japan to uphold, reform and shape the order, and examines Japan's assets as well as constraints as it seeks to play the role of a proactive stabilizer in the Asia-Pacific.

The negotiation of international trade agreements has become the issue of the moment. With Brexit, a change in administration in the United States, a fragile economic recovery in the Eurozone and China facing a slowdown in its growth, nothing is more critical to the future global economy than the terms of trade between its largest economic blocs. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is Europe's most controversial trade agreement ever. Aimed at reducing regulatory barriers between the United States and the EU, it was expected to be fairly straightforward given strong business support on both sides of the Atlantic. It has not been so. The negotiations have dragged on far longer than anticipated and now look set to fail altogether. Yet the process of its negotiation, the terms of the potential agreement and its sticking points provide valuable lessons for policy-makers and academics tasked to bring future trade deals and arrangements to successful conclusions. Alasdair Young offers a penetrating analysis of the complexities of the TTIP negotiations and explores why they have proved so difficult to conclude, what motivates the different parties concerned and what implications there are for politics and policy. Young throws light on the limits of the transatlantic cooperation and the processes of globalization and teases out the implications for the UK in its post-Brexit trade negotiations and for other nations now facing a more protectionist stance from the United States.

International trade has, for decades, been central to economic growth and improved standards of living for nations and regions worldwide. For most of the advanced countries, trade has raised standards of living, while for most emerging economies, growth did not begin until their integration into the global economy. The economic explanation is simple: international trade facilitates specialization, increased efficiency and improved productivity to an extent impossible in closed economies. However, recent years have seen a significant slowdown in global trade, and the global system has increasingly come under attack from politicians on the right and on the left. The benefits of open markets, the continuation of international co-operation, and the usefulness of multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have all been called into question. While globalization has had a broadly positive effect on overall global welfare, it has also been perceived by the public as damaging communities and social classes in the industrialized world, spawning, for example, Brexit and the US exit from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The purpose of this volume is to examine international and regional preferential trade agreements (PTAs), which offer like-minded countries a possible means to continue receiving the benefits of economic liberalization and expanded trade. What are the strengths and weaknesses of such agreements, and how can they sustain growth and prosperity for their members in an ever-challenging global economic environment? The Handbook is divided into two parts. The first, Global Themes, offers analysis of issues including the WTO, trade agreements and economic development, intellectual property rights, security and environmental issues, and PTAs and developing countries. The second part examines regional and country-specific agreements and issues, including NAFTA, CARICOM, CETA, the Pacific Alliance, the European Union, EFTA, ECOWAS, SADC, TTIP, RCEP and the TPP (now the CPTPP), as well as the policies of countries such as Japan and Australia.

While the long-term gains from liberalization are generally accepted, liberalizing economies are, nevertheless, likely to face short to medium term adjustment costs. Yet most developing countries do not have well-developed social safety nets to address these problems. This book gauges the possible development implications of the current WTO trade negotiations by examining the various proposals and assessing their likely economic impact. Eight country studies examine the experiences of a number of countries at different levels of development and across various regions to ascertain the impact of their trade reforms and the factors contributing to the outcomes.

All is not well in the World Trade Organization. Does a global economy require global institutions? One possible alternative is interregionalism: economic integration between two distinct regions. This book explores the logic of interregionalism by focusing on the European Union, which has pursued agreements with Latin America, East Asia, and the Southern Mediterranean, among others. Why has the EU pursued this strategy? Based on a novel theoretical framework, the authors in this book explore EU interregionalism to provide us with insight into this new emerging face of the international political economy.

The diversity of Latin American trade agreements established since the mid-1980s reflects a broadening range of strategic perceptions and orientations. The argument of this volume is that this increasing divergence among the arrangements reflects fundamental and growing differences among their broader strategic perceptions and political and economic objectives. These, in turn, are grounded in each country's economic profile, the institutional configuration of its trade policy process, and the constraints and opportunities policymakers perceive at the domestic and international levels. The opening chapter in this volume provides a theoretical framework that highlights the political-economic tradeoffs entailed in different trade strategies. The remaining chapters in sections I and II focus on domestic and international constraints involved in the formulation, pursuit, and implementation of trade policies. The last half of the volume contains detailed, empirically grounded studies of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and the dynamics of Mercosur.

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.

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. These are the WTO authorized and paginated reports in English. An essential addition to the library of all practising and academic trade lawyers, and needed by students worldwide taking courses in international economic or trade law. DSR 1998: IX reports two cases. Firstly, this volume contains both Reports of the Appellate Body and of the Panel in the Guatemalian case about the anti-dumping investigation regarding portland cement from Mexico. Secondly, there is the Award of the Arbitrator in the Indonesian case regarding the automobile industry. The form of citation for this volume recommended by the WTO is DSR 1998: IX.