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Simon Lester

Simon Lester

Co-founder of WorldTradeLaw.net and China Trade Monitor. Non-resident fellow at the Baker Institute.

http://simonlester.com

Trade Remedy Trends: Onward and Upward

From Chad Bown, formerly at Brandeis, but now at the World Bank: * Industry demands for these new import barriers continued to increase in the third quarter 2009 above and beyond the sharp increase that began in 2008 with the global spread of the financial crisis. Compared to the same time

Bernanke on Trade Imbalances

In a recent speech on "Asia and the Global Financial Crisis," Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke made this point about trade: Because strong export markets helped Asia recover from that crisis, and because many countries in the region were badly hurt by sharp reversals in capital flows, the crisis

Competitive Trade Liberalization in Action

From the Korea Herald: The Korea-U.S. free-trade agreement should be ratified before tariffs on goods from the European Union get cut in Asia's fourth-largest economy, president of the American business lobby group here said yesterday. "I don't want to see tariffs

EC Considers Removing GSP+ Tariff Preferences for Sri Lanka

From the European Commission: The Commission has completed a thorough investigation into the human rights situation in Sri Lanka and in particular whether Sri Lanka is living up to the commitments it made to respect international human rights standards when it became a beneficiary of the European Union's

Symposium and Web Site on International Investment and ADR

New from Washington and Lee / UNCTAD: Washington and Lee University School of Law and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) cordially invite you to attend the Joint Symposium on International Investment Law and Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR). The purpose of the Joint Symposium is to explore the

More Investor-State Debate

Following up on this post, the State Department's Advisory Committee on International Economic Policy (ACIEP) recently held a review of the U.S. Model BIT. The report issued by the Committee has a discussion of many issues under BITs, including the investor-state dispute mechanism. It's

Fred Bergsten on Currency Undervaluation

From an article entitled "The Dollar and the Deficits: How Washington Can Prevent the Next Crisis": A central goal of US foreign economic policy must be to prevent and counter deliberate currency undervaluations by other major countries, which keep the dollar overvalued and harm US competitiveness. China has

A Contrario Update

For those of you familiar with the "a contrario" argument in relation to the SCM Agreement illustrative list, I thought this passage from the U.S. - Cotton Article 4.11 arbitration would be of interest: 4.161 Thirdly, we do not consider that there is any legitimate basis

Lamy on Services Liberalization

From a recent speech by WTO DG Pascal Lamy: Trade, or more specifically financial services liberalization, was neither a villain nor a cause of this crisis but a casualty. As you all know, in the world of the GATS, “liberalization” is essentially about opening specified sectors to competition on a

Climate Change Measures and Lost Oil Exports

I have often wondered how oil producing countries would react to lost oil exports if other countries ever begin to take serious action to shift to renewable energy. So far, very little has been done in this regard, so it has not been a big issue. But it does seem