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Simon Lester

More on the SolarWorld AC/CVD Complaint

Following up on the last post, I was curious about the reference to "WTO-legal subsidies and WTO-illegal subsidies." So I asked the SolarWorld people the following question: In what way are the Chinese subsidies "WTO-illegal"? Does that mean that they violate the SCM Agreement in the

More on Responses to Foreign Subsidies

Yesterday brought news of an AC/CVD petition in the U.S. in relation to imports of Chinese solar panels. Here's the FT: A coalition of US solar panel manufacturers asked on Wednesday for retaliatory tariffs on imports of panels from China, the first such case filed in

“Do Subsidies Justify Retaliatory Protectionism?”

From economist Don Boudreaux: As an empirical matter ... the costs of subsidies are borne chieﬂy by citizens of the country whose government uses subsidies while the beneﬁt of subsidies is enjoyed overwhelmingly by that country’s trading partners. Still – because trade makes markets less and less national and more and

Call for Papers: Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law

Call for Papers: March 2012 Symposium, International Economic Law Interest Group, Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law Following the success of its inaugural symposium in February 2011, the International Economic Law Interest Group of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law (ANZSIL) is holding a research

Romney vs. Huntsman on Trade

From Tuesday's GOP debate: ROSE: ... We also know here that there has been a paradigm shift in the world economic order. We know about China and we know about India. Here is our next clip and we will respond from that. Here it is. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) ROMNEY:

Passage of the U.S. Trade Agreements

As everyone has probably heard at this point, yesterday the U.S. Congress approved trade agreements with Korea, Colombia and Panama. They will now be signed into law by President Obama. I feel obligated to say something about this. But I'm not quite sure what to say. If

SIEL Conference in Hamburg

1st Conference of the Postgraduate and Early Professionals/Academics of the Society of International Economic Law (PEPA/SIEL) Hamburg, 27 and 28 January 2012 Organized by SIEL in cooperation with the Institute of Law and Economics of the University of Hamburg and Leiden University SIEL was founded in 2008 to

Tokyo Round Thoughts on Mandatory Labelling

For those who have been following the technical regulations vs. standards debate here, let me add something else to the mix. Here's something from a Secretariat note from early in the Tokyo Round: 4. With regard to labelling it was pointed out that in some cases labelling was

EU Aviation Emissions Scheme Opinion

The BBC reports: Plans to include any airline landing or taking off on EU territory in an emissions trading scheme are legal, an adviser to Europe's top court has said. European Court of Justice Advocate General Juliane Kokott said this in response to a legal challenge to the

A WTO Prosecutor?

Here's the abstract of a new article from Claus Zimmerman in the Journal of World Trade, entitled 'Rethinking the Right to Initiate WTO Dispute Settlement Proceedings': This article analyses the economic merits of the factual right of governments to interpose themselves as political filters ex ante