Simon Lester

In light of all of the recent talk about the U.S. adopting a VAT-ish tax reform, I thought it was worth revisiting a fundamental question. Everyone seems to be operating under the assumption that a VAT is covered by GATT Article II:2(a) and Article III, and

China's WTO complaint related to certain anti-dumping methodologies used by the US Department of Commerce is here (the parallel complaint against the EU is here).  For now, I'm not going to get into the specific methodologies or AD Agreement legal obligations, but instead will focus

Following-up on Joel's great post from a few days ago, here's more on the GOP tax plan, from Reuven Avi-Yonah and Kimberly Clausing: The introduction to the Ryan proposal (the “Blueprint”) states that: This Blueprint represents a dramatic reform of the current income tax

As noted recently here on this blog, border tax adjustments are a hot topic in tax and trade policy. This issue is not a new one; it has been around for a long time. In his masterpiece "World Trade and the Law of GATT," published in 1969, the

The award in the Windstream v. Canada NAFTA Chapter 11 investment arbitration was recently published. Investment Arbitration Reporter has a full summary here. I wanted to highlight two aspects of the fair and equitable treatment reasoning. First, the tribunal seemed to apply a strict "no dictionaries" principle: 357.

The 15 year period after China's WTO accession during which litigation about the treatment of China as a "non-market economy" was put on hold has now expired, and the litigation can commence. This is from Inside US Trade: China this week wasted no time challenging

I've had a few questions from friends and reporters asking what I thought of the GOP tax plan set out here.  This is a key excerpt from the plan: Today, all of our major trading partners raise a significant portion of their tax revenues through value-added taxes

I wanted to welcome Inu Manak as a contributor to this blog. Inu was our research assistant at Cato's trade policy center, and she has been my co-author on several journal articles and op-eds. She is now a PhD student in poli sci at Georgetown (studying

Like most people, I didn't expect the UK voters to support Brexit. I figured this vote would be like all the other secession votes that come along, with a rejection at the end.  But with the vote going the way it did, whatever you think of the idea

This is from the Financial Times: Germany’s highest court has ruled that the country’s utilities should be compensated for the government’s decision in the wake of the Fukushima disaster to shut down all Germany’s nuclear reactors. The decision by the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe is a