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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

COOL Down Under

Australia will have mandatory country of origin labelling for food soon: Australia will introduce mandatory country-of-origin food labeling from 2016, Prime Minister Tony Abbott said on Tuesday, a move given impetus by a hepatitis outbreak earlier in the year blamed on contaminated berries from China. Under the new

The "Right to Regulate"

It should be obvious to long-time readers that I am concerned about policy space and regulatory autonomy under trade and investment agreements. However, I have doubts that the "right to regulate" is a good way to describe the issue: Talk of "rights" can be unproductive

Person to Government Dispute Settlement in Canada

This is from Canada's Premiers (a group made up of Canada’s 13 provincial and territorial Premiers.) Premiers also announced the coming into force of an improved Person-to-Government dispute settlement process under the Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT). The new dispute process includes the introduction of

Trade Polling: Americans Don't Think Trade Matters Much

Based on some recent polling, neither Americans in general, nor various scholars, think the TPP or TTIP matters much, at least to them personally: and:

GATT Article XX: The Chapeau vs. the Sub-Paragraphs

This is from Lorand Bartels, in the latest AJIL: The Chapeau of the General Exceptions in the WTO GATT and GATS Agreements: A Reconstruction ... Conclusions This article argues that the Appellate Body has misunderstood the chapeau and that, in particular, there is no analytic, structural, or even thematic difference between

Water Pricing and Subsidies

Let's say California is experiencing a serious drought. And let's say companies are bottling and selling municipal water from California. And let's say that the price set by the government for the purchase of this water is low enough that it contributes to consumption

Tie Votes at the ITC and WTO

This is from Inside US Trade: In Tie Vote, ITC Find U.S. Producers Are Injured By Chinese Tire Imports In a victory for the United Steelworkers (USW) union, the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) on Tuesday (July 14) issued a final determination that domestic tire producers are being

Non-Violation and TRIPS (and GATT and GATS)

This is from a submission by a number of WTO Members who are skeptical of allowing non-violation and situation complaints -- through the removal of the current moratorium on those complaints -- under the TRIPS Agreement: Non-violation and situation complaints are unnecessary to protect any balance of rights and obligations

Some IP Protections Probably Go Too Far

This is from Fredrik Erixon of Brussels think tank ECIPE: Thirdly, it is difficult to find economic justifications to put copyright concerns in the top league of priorities. Copyrights are already much longer than is economically motivated. There is not an efficient system for global registration and transfers of copyrights;

The TPP and Jobs

I wish there were a lot less talk of the TPP leading to massive job losses or job gains, and instead people said more sensible things like this, from Ted Moran: But economists are taught—as a matter of theory—that trade agreements cannot be expected to create a greater