International Economic Law and Policy Blog

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Simon Lester

A Bold Proposal on Anti-Dumping

From a letter to the FT by Professors Robert McGee and Yeomin Yoon: President Obama should be audacious enough to proclaim the following: In a free enterprise economic system, domestic producers have no inherent claim on the funds of consumers. The only ethical way of obtaining the funds of consumers

Tariff Preferences and Drug Policies

This all sounds familiar. A developed country uses illegal drug production/trafficking as a criterion for deciding which countries to include in a tariff preference program. The DS246 EC - Tariff Preferences case, brought by India? No, this time it's the United States excluding Bolivia from one of

China Does Not Like Carbon Tariffs

Reuters reports: Proposals to impose "carbon tariffs" on imported products will violate the rules of the World Trade Organization as well as the spirit of the Kyoto Protocol, China's Ministry of Commerce said. In a statement posted on its website, the ministry said collecting carbon duties

Catfish Inspection: A Difficult Trade Issue

As this AP article explains, there is a long history of trade disputes involving the U.S. catfish industry and its Vietnamese competitors, including anti-dumping duties and labelling regulations. The latest chapter is particularly interesting, though, because it gets at what I think could be a growth industry for trade

China's PC Software Filtering Delayed

Bloomberg reports: China postponed tomorrow’s deadline for personal-computer makers to include a state-backed anti- pornography software on new PCs after U.S. officials and business groups urged it to scrap the rule

Twittering About Trade Law

I can't figure out what to make of Twitter. Is this really the next big thing? In case it is, a little while ago I went ahead and used the RSS feeds for our news service and this blog to create a Twitter feed. (I think this is

PC Filtering: The Investment Issues

Over at the Kluwer Arbitration Blog, Luke Peterson talks about the investment aspects of the Chinese PC filtering issue. He notes: One critical question in any claims arising out of this internet-filtering software dispute would be the expectations that investors had upon entering the Chinese market. For instance, it has

Obama on Carbon Tariffs

From a NY Times interview: Q. One of the provisions that got added very late to this bill that senators had expressed some reservations about was the one that puts tariffs on goods imported from countries that don't have these sort of restrictions. What do you think of

Krugman on the WTO and Cap and Trade

Paul Krugman is happy with the recent WTO/UNEP report on trade and climate change: There was some question about how the WTO would handle cap-and-trade — whether it would accept the need for carbon tariffs, if some countries (cough China cough) drag their feet, or whether it would adopt a

More on the Software Filtering Issue

The Economist mentions an interesting new detail about China's efforts to have all personal computers sold in China come with filtering software called Green Dam Youth Escort: An American firm, Solid Oak Software, claims Green Dam includes stolen copyrighted code from one of its products, and has launched