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Simon Lester

Simon Lester

Co-founder of WorldTradeLaw.net and China Trade Monitor. Non-resident fellow at the Baker Institute.

http://simonlester.com

Global Trade Watch on the Lighthizer Nomination

From the Global Trade Watch blog: The nomination of Robert Lighthizer to be U.S. Trade Representative signals President-elect Donald Trump’s interest in altering the trade policy approach that has prevailed through Republican and Democratic administrations for the past two decades. Lighthizer has consistently noted that historically Republicans

Robert Lighthizer as U.S. Trade Rep

From the WSJ: Donald Trump is expected to name Robert Lighthizer, a former trade official under President Ronald Reagan, to head the U.S. Trade Representative office, the first in a final push of appointments anticipated this week as Mr. Trump fills the remaining senior government vacancies in the run-

Prospects for a NZ-US FTA

I'm not a fan of letting foreign policy influence trade policy (which is one of the reasons I prefer multilateral trade liberalization to bilateral or regional trade deals, which are particularly susceptible), but there is no question that it sometimes does. In this regard, I often come across

The Hormones Dispute May Be Back On

From a USTR press release today: The Obama Administration announced today that the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) is taking action against the European Union’s (EU) unfair trade practices that discriminate against U.S. beef imports. Acting on the request of the U.S. beef industry,

US Presidential Power To Undermine Trade Agreements

Last week, Joel had a post entitled "US Presidential Power to Terminate Trade Agreements," in which he discussed the difficulties that a U.S. President would have in ending U.S. participation in existing trade agreements, without Congressional consent. His post may have been reassuring to some people

Do GATT Article II:2(a) and Article III Allow Tax Adjustments for Value Added Taxes?

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 Against U.S. NME Treatment

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

Avi-Yonah and Clausing on the GOP Tax Plan

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

John Jackson on Border Tax Adjustments

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 Windstream Investment Arbitration

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.