Simon Lester

Todd Tucker, formerly of Global Trade Watch and now studying at Cambridge University, recently did a post about my international investment regime paper.  Thanks to Todd for the publicity!  Read his whole post to get a full flavor; I just wanted to respond to a few specific things he says.

For the Obama administration, from Global Trade Watch: 1. Is the fact that there is no intellectual property chapter text to even negotiate over – even a heavily bracketed text – related to unwavering multi-year opposition to U.S. patent and copyright text proposals? 2. Is the multi-year deadlock over

Last week, I mentioned a Cato event on the TPP, on Sep 20 (register here: http://www.cato.org/events/trans-pacific-partnership-race-finish-or-long-slog-ahead).  Well, we also have an event on Oct 2 called "The WTO and the Uncertain Future of Multilateralism."  It

From my friends at Georgetown's Institute of International Economic Law (IIEL), here is some information about their WTO Academy, a week long course that runs from Nov 18 to 22 this year: The Academy is an intensive professional development program on the law and policy of the World

From the folks at MOFCOM, here is a Bidding Announcement for MOFCOM's Law Firm Pool for WTO and RTA work: As required by Government Procurement Law of P.R.China, Ministry of Commerce will establish Candidate List of Law Firms by public bidding. And MOFCOM will select the

This proposal related to free trade in environmental goods, from Sweden's National Board of Trade, may be more politically palatable than the one I recently put forward:

Last week, I mentioned Brazilian requirements for local data storage.  What does everyone think about this new proposal out of Brazil to create an email competitor to the major U.S. email providers: The Brazilian government is planning to develop a national email system that is protected from the sort

From the Washington Post: The [Brazilian] government is now introducing changes in the project that are quite problematic. One of them mandates that companies that store any type of Brazilian data have their servers physically located in Brazil. The idea of the government is that having the servers here will

-- The WSJ:  "The entire point of free-trade negotiations is to remove these political obstacles to investment and the movement of goods across borders. The tobacco carve-out is especially counterproductive because its economic importance is so small. The Obama Administration shouldn't let anti-smoking activists interfere

As you may have heard, we are now in the TPP "end game."  What does that mean exactly?  Will we have a completed TPP by the end of the year, as some have indicated?  Or will the pace be more Doha-like? For those of you in the