Simon Lester

Lots of people are asking about what the Trump administration will do with investment treaties and investment chapters of FTAs.  Will their sovereignty concerns mean they reject ISDS?  Or will their pro-business views mean they support ISDS? This from the LA Times is one of the first reports of White

Compliance review in the DS461 dispute, Colombia - Textiles, is proceeding in the strangest order I can remember seeing.  Keep in mind that Panama was the complainant and Colombia was the respondent in the underlying dispute. Here's the timeline of the compliance part: February 9, 2017: Panama proposes

As I mentioned here last week, TransCanada's NAFTA Chapter 11 claim is now over, after the State Department issued a Presidential permit for building the Keystone XL pipeline.  The transcript of President Trump talking about this with TransCanada's CEO is here, and the ICSID web site

OK, not really on ISDS, but touching on ISDS to a very slight degree. Here's what he said a couple days ago: I’ve cleared the way for the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines -- and added a requirement that American pipelines be constructed with American steel.

This is from Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross at his confirmation hearing (sorry about the all caps -- that's how it was at the link and I don't feel like retyping it): BUT I WOULD HOPE THAT IF CONFIRMED I CAN CONTRIBUTE TOWARD DESIGNING KIND OF

This is from the FT: Finance ministers from the world’s biggest economies have dropped pledges to renounce protectionism in a meeting marked by tension over trade between the US and others including China. G20 finance ministers meeting in the German resort town of Baden-Baden noted the importance of trade

This is also from Todd Tucker's report: ... The U.S. trade deficits with Mexico and China went up after trade deals were finalized with both countries. Summarizing the research that uses such deficit-based measures (and attempting to control for trade displacement he believes would have happened anyway as

This is from the Todd Tucker progressive trade policy vision that I mentioned in the last post: ... The benefits of international cooperation on fighting tax evasion, monopoly power, unstable financial markets, climate change, and macroeconomic imbalances from misaligned currencies far outstrip even the most optimistic projections for agreements like the

Progressives might disagree among themselves on what they want out of trade policy, but the vision of one particular progressive, long-time friend of this blog Todd Tucker, is here. First, let me say that I love the title of his report: "The Sustainable Equitable Trade Doctrine: Building Progressive International