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Simon Lester

Fixed vs. Floating Exchange Rates (and Conservative vs. Conservative)

Scott Lincicome reports on recent remarks of Nobel Prize-winning economist Prof. Robert Mundell (who is described by the Heritage Foundation as "the academic founder of supply side economics"). Here's a summary of the key point for my purposes, from Sean Rushton of NRO:[Mundell] says the

Tobacco Trademarks and BITs, TRIPS and NAFTA

Following up on the "plain packaging of tobacco products under TRIPS" post, which generated a good deal of discussion, there's a related issue in a BIT challenge to Uruguayan measures that affect the use of trademarks. As Luke Peterson of the Investment Arbitration Reporter explained a

Pascal Lamy on Trade Fallacies

In a recent speech (well, not that recent at this point -- I got distracted by other things), WTO DG Pascal Lamy addressed six "trade fallacies": Fallacy #1: Comparative advantage does not work anymore Fallacy #2: It is unhealthy for trade to grow faster and faster compared to

Manufacturing Comes Back to America

From the Daily Show: The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c Wham-O Moves to America www.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Drafting the WTO's "General Exceptions"

Over at Opinio Juris, Roger Alford discusses the different policy exceptions included in the GATT and GATS "General Exceptions," and then says: " I have yet to discover a satisfactory explanation for the disparate treatment that the WTO drafters have given to the general exceptions in GATT versus

Do BITs Promote Foreign Direct Investment?

From Jason Yackee, on SSRN, a new paper entitled "Do Bilateral Investment Treaties Promote Foreign Direct Investment? Some Hints from Alternative Evidence": In this article I present a multi-method examination of whether bilateral investment treaties, or BITs, are likely to promote inflows of foreign direct investment. Using regression

Guest Post: Russia-Ukraine Gas Deal: Any potential WTO-related issues?

The Moscow Times has reported that Russia and Ukraine reached a new gas agreement under which Russia would effectively give a 30 percent discount for its gas exports to Ukraine, potentially costing cost Russia approximately $40 billion over the life of the agreement. (see Anatoly Medetsky, “Deal Struck on Gas,

Some Congressional Criticism of the Cotton Deal

Via Sallie James of Cato, I see that four members of Congress want real reform of U.S. cotton subsidies and are not happy with the proposed deal with Brazil: “This proposal takes our federal farm subsidy policy from the impractical to the absurd,” said Rep. Flake. “We want to

Why the Decline in Anti-Globalization Protests?

Kindred Winecoff notes that anti-globalization protests have died down over the years, and wonders why: I can think of a few possibilities. First, the protests were loudest in the 1990s because of NAFTA (1994), the establishment of the WTO to supplant the GATT (1995), the fairly brutal "Big Bang&

Why Is ACTA Called a "Trade Agreement"?

Following-up on Henning's post, let me ask a very basic question: Why is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) referred to as a "trade agreement"? I'm sure this has been discussed somewhere, but I have not come across it. As Henning points out, ACTA appears