Simon Lester

From a speech by WTO DG Pascal Lamy: Agreement is still lacking on the balance of contributions and benefits between the US, the EU, Japan and the like on the one side, and India, China, Brazil and the like on the other side. Advanced economies argue that emerging economies have

From a paper by some economists, titled "The Case Against Patents": Current international trade negotiations that affect patents often occur as part of either the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which was signed in 1995 as part of the World Trade Organization negotiations, or

Here's something that the many academics reading this blog may be interested in.  I've mentioned MOOCs (massive open online courses) briefly a couple times.  Now I've written something more detailed:  A Cato paper called Liberalizing Cross-Border Trade in Higher Education: The Coming Revolution of

From an op-ed in the Santiago Times: ... the insistence on achieving so-called “deep integration,” primarily of interest to U.S. negotiators, is undermining negotiations and obscuring what should be the ultimate goal of the TPP process: easier movement of goods and services across the Pacific. ... ... despite clear and at times

Bear with me for a second, I'm going to play a little fast and loose with the facts of an actual case here.  Consider the following scenario. Imagine Samsung has built an assembly factory for its smartphones and tablets here in the U.S.  It imports some components

A reader emails with this question: Are there any studies on the advantage of being a “first mover” in trade negotiations, and whether that makes a difference?  An example is the EU and GIs – does it benefit the EU to get out ahead and negotiate a series of free trade

So let's say Antigua goes ahead with retaliating against the U.S. in the Gambling case.  How might the U.S. respond?  Here's one suggestion: A lawyer for a group on intellectual property rights warned on Monday that the tiny island nation of Antigua could face

As the U.S. and EU continue to battle over whether billions of dollars in aircraft subsidies violate WTO rules, the NY Times has a strange article that -- perhaps time travelling back to the 1980s -- seems to think it has identified the real culprit: Japan!  OK, that may

A little while back, I asked who would do the first international economic law MOOC (massive open online course).  If you interpret IEL broadly enough, we have a winner: The Law of the European Union, offered through Coursera, by a Leiden University professor. But there are still many opportunities for

In the comments on an older post, Brett Williams points to some news about Antigua's proposed retaliation in the Gambling case: http://torrentfreak.com/antigua-government-set-to-launch-pirate-website-to-punish-united-states-130124/  He then asks: Can anyone provide any information about the outcome of the GATS Article XXI renegotiation initiated by the US. I could