Simon Lester

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

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,

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

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