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Simon Lester

Trade in Everything: Replicas of the Royal Engagement Rings

From Reuters: Britain may be on the other side of the world, but Chinese manufacturers are cashing in on the British royal wedding as they churn out tens of thousands of replica royal engagement rings. Last November, Prince William and his beaming fiancee Kate Middleton showed off the blue sapphire

Current Account Imbalances: Part 2 (Martin Feldstein)

Here's post #2 on the current account imbalances issue. Martin Feldstein thinks these imbalances will, for the most part, take care of themselves, without any grand international plan to fix them. He leads off his paper this way: The high level of current account imbalances has been a

Current Account Imbalances: Part 1 (John Williamson)

There is lots of talk about trade imbalances these days, with surplus countries pitted against deficit countries. There is the U.S. versus China, of course, but there is also Germany versus Greece. The U.S.-China issue gets more press attention (at least here in the U.S.), and

Inter-National versus Intra-National Protectionism

Here's an excerpt from an old post by economist Don Boudreaux (via recent posts from Mark Perry and Scott Lincicome): Ifintra Indeed, such an objective scholar should be open also to the possibility that residents of Nashville can be made wealthier if their leaders restrict their ability to

Making GSP More "Rule-Oriented"

Lorand Bartels and Christian Haeberli have an interesting article on GSP in the latest edition of the JIEL, in which they propose two ways "to increase the security and predictability of these preferential schemes, permitting decisions by investors and traders to be taken without fear of an arbitrary withdrawal

The China Wind Power WTO Complaint

Speaking of U.S. - China economic law, as Sungjoon was in the last post, here's the key part of the U.S. WTO complaint related to alleged Chinese subsidies to the wind power industry (DS419): My authorities have instructed me to request consultations with the Government of

The End of Zeroing and the Doha Round

A friend of mine and I were just talking about what impact the DOC's proposal to end zeroing in administrative reviews would have on the Doha negotiations. In this regard, a recent FT article notes: The US trade representative’s office said it would seek to negotiate a

The Bahamas WTO Accession

WTO accessions are often hard to see from the outside. You only get tiny hints of what's going on. So, I've been very interested to read what the Bahamians have had to say publicly in relation to how they are thinking about their accession process, which

Report on the Second Oral Hearing in the WTO Airbus Dispute

Here's more reporting on the WTO Appellate Body oral hearings in the Airbus dispute, by Malorie Schaus (malorie.schaus [at] graduateinstitute.ch) and Tobiasz Kaczor (tobiasz.kaczor [at] gmail.com) of the Graduate Institute in Geneva. This is their report of the participants' and third participants'

More on Article III:2, first sentence discrimination in Philippines - Spirits

Recall this post on the EU position in the Philippines - Distilled Spirits (DS396,403) case in relation to Article III:2, first sentence, where I characterized the EU argument on the discrimination aspect of this standard as follows: "the discriminatory effect (or disparate impact or disproportionate disadvantage or