This morning, in a major address, Canada's foreign minister Chrystia Freeland laid out the government's objectives for the renegotiation of NAFTA.  This is the key passage from her speech: First, we aim to modernize NAFTA. The agreement is 23 years old. The global, North American, and

Apropos of the commencement of NAFTA renegotiation next week, I just posted on SSRN a draft paper arguing that the President lacks independent power to terminate trade agreements.  Here are the title and abstract.  Comments are most welcome. Terminating Trade Agreements: the Presidential Dormant Commerce Clause Versus a Constitutional Gloss

Once again, the international media, along with some EU officials, are presenting Greece's former chief statistician Andreas Georgiou as a martyr.  The story goes as follows:  during the crisis Mr. Georgiou was not only an honest but heroic apostle for truth in numbers, unflinching in revealing the awful

The Washington Post has a transcript of President Trump's January 27 phone call with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. Here are some excerpts related to trade: Trump: ... I consider you a friend and I consider Luis, the person working with you, a very smart man. To be very

Yesterday, led by Charles Schumer of New York, a group of Senate Democrats unveiled a protectionist trade platform that, as the New York Times put it, "seek[s] to outdo Trump on trade." The platform includes taking unilateral action against our trading partners "independent from...WTO constraints&

Law student Ritwik Bhattacharya sends along an interesting short paper on China's non-market economy status, entitled "Three Viewpoints on China's Non-Market Economy Status."  Here's the abstract: On December 15, 2016, China requested consultations with the United States and the European Union, regarding

Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross has a new op-ed in the WSJ.  One thing he does in the op-ed is include a chart of average applied tariffs for the U.S., EU and China, after which he says this: As the nearby chart shows, China’s tariffs are higher than

In a recent ESIL Reflection, Malcolm Langford, Daniel Behn and Runar Hilleren Lie examine “The Ethics and Empirics of Double Hatting” in investor-state arbitration. (For the full article, see the Journal of International Economic Law). They found that a total of 47% of the cases they studied involved at least

At the risk of overdoing it with NAFTA Chapter 19 here on this blog, another question just occurred to me. The bi-national panel system for reviewing domestic AD/CVD decisions started in the Canada - U.S. FTA, and was then brought into NAFTA.  But it has never been used