Simon Lester

Thanks again to Rob for all of his posts on the Seal Products hearing. Maybe some day WTO hearings will get press coverage that is as extensive as U.S. Supreme Court hearings, but for now that is not the case, so it was nice to have access to Rob&

From the WTO web site: Cuba notified the WTO Secretariat, on 3 May 2013, of a request for consultations with Australia on the Australian Tobacco Plain Packaging Act of 2011 that regulates the appearance and form of retail packaging used in connection with sales of cigars, cigarettes and other tobacco

This is from the second EU written submission in seal products: 199. Canada considers that the EU Seal Regime, through the IC exception, modifies the conditions of competition to the detriment of its imports when compared with imports of Greenland. Specifically, Canada suggests that, in the case of an origin-neutral

From CTV: A court has upheld the European Union's three-year-old ban on seal products, dealing another blow to Canada's embattled sealing industry. The General Court of the European Union issued a statement today saying it has rejected a challenge from a group that included the Canadian

A recent article argues that a lot of them are: we hypothesize that SPS notification activity is correlated with the amount of protectionism afforded traded agricultural products and with the level of demand for protectionism by agricultural producers. To test our claims, we assemble a dataset recording the annual number

This is from a new Peterson Institute paper: In a recent book, The Cost Disease: Why Computers Get Cheaper and Health Care Doesn’t, William Baumol reports some arresting numbers to illustrate the spiraling cost of key services which are plagued by slow productivity growth. Since the 1980s, the price

A couple months ago, I mentioned a new proposal for a Multilateral Investment Agreement.  Axel Berger of the Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) has a skeptical response here.  An excerpt: The shortcomings of the current investment regime can be better dealt with in the context of regional negotiations; these should,

From the EU second written submission: There's a policy issue here which may not have been in the drafters' minds when they wrote the definition of "technical regulation".  When you ban an input product, are you therefore regulating all finished products that use the input?

This is from the second EU written submission in the Seal Products case: The legal standard under Articles I:1 and III:4 of the GATT 1994 and Article 2.1 of the TBT Agreement with respect to their non-discrimination obligations is fundamentally the same In support of this view,

I always thought of a "local content requirement" as a requirement that a producer ensure that a certain percentage of inputs in the production process come from local sources. But USTR seems to be using the term differently: APEC Breaking Ground on Local Content Requirements Ahead of High-Level