International Economic Law and Policy Blog

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Simon Lester

Using Trade Law to Enforce Investment Law

From Reuters: A U.S. company plans to ask the Obama administration for help in recovering more than $230 million it says it is owned by the government of Argentina, an attorney for the company said on Monday. Stephen Kho, a lawyer with the Akin Gump law firm, said it

The Environmental Kuznets Curve and GATT Article XX

From last month's China - Exportation of Raw Materials panel report: 7.551 We now turn to analyse the second step in China's argument about the long-term benefits of export restrictions on EPR products, namely that there is a strong link between higher growth and environmental

Sea Turtles, Dolphins, Seals ... and Sharks?

Marine life has played an important role in GATT/WTO dispute settlement. Here's an argument for bringing sharks into the mix: Oceana, the largest international advocacy group working solely to protect the world’s oceans, called on the United States government today to ban the import of shark

Investor-State: Learning as We Go

On SSRN, here's the abstract of a paper entitled "When the Claim Hits: Bilateral Investment Treaties and Bounded Rational Learning," by Lauge Skovgaard Poulsen and Emma Aisbett: Using the international investment regime as its point of departure, the paper introduces notions of bounded rationality to the

Delineating the Outer Limits of Investment Treaties

In an ASIL Insight entitled "The Australian Trade Policy Statement on Investor-State Dispute Settlement," Jürgen Kurtz writes: States can protect domestic policy space in an investment treaty by clearly delineating the outer limits of substantive obligations and/or crafting exceptions for state conduct. For instance, the investment chapter

The Purpose of International Investment Agreements

From a paper by Anne Van Aaken and Tobias A. Lehmann, entitled "Investment and Sustainable Development: Developing a New Conceptual Framework": It is already questionable whether the only purpose of [International Investment Agreements] IIAs is the protection of investment. Rather, as most preambles reveal, protection of investment is

The Debt Deal and Farm Subsidies

Jim Bacchus recently called for cutting farm subsidies as a way to reduce the U.S. budget deficit and give a boost to the Doha Round. So what happened with farm subsidies in the debt deal? Well, it remains to be seen, from what I've read so far.

U.S. Fuel Efficiency Standards: Trucks vs. Cars

From Reuters: The Obama administration has reached a compromise with automakers on a new fuel economy target for cars and trucks, ending months of negotiations on this pivotal mandate for the auto industry. Automaker fleets will now have to average 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, according to people

Deep vs. Shallow Integration in Trade Agreements

From the press release for the World Trade Report 2011: Deep PTAs More and more PTAs are deep rather than shallow agreements. They include a wide range of issues beyond tariffs, such as services, investment, intellectual property protection, and competition policy. These policy areas involve domestic regulations (or behind-the-border measures)

Bilateral vs. Multilateral Trade Agreements: The U.S. View

Via Larry Friedman, I see the following from a speech by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Hong Kong: we are pursuing new cutting-edge trade deals that raise the standards for fair competition even as they open new markets. For instance, the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement, or KORUS, will eliminate