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Katherine Tai on Trade Policy Pitting Americans against Americans

At a House Ways and Means Committee hearing last week, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said a couple times that she wanted "to stop pitting Americans against Americans" in U.S. trade policy: * "Trade should work for all Americans. Our goal is to stop pitting Americans
Simon Lester 21 Apr 2024 2 min read

Senator Whitehouse and Ambassador Tai Talk About Getting Rid of ISDS

Here's an exchange between Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and U.S. Trade Rep. Katherine Tai at a Senate Finance Committee hearing today (2:32:00): Whitehouse: The other thing I wanted to talk with you about is the loathsome ISDS process. We are not putting ISDS provisions into
Simon Lester 17 Apr 2024 2 min read

Subsidies, Overcapacity, and Domestic Demand/Savings

There has been a lot of discussion recently about how Chinese subsidies and other government support has led to industrial overcapacity, which can have a negative impact on the manufacturing sector of other economies. If domestic supply exceeds domestic demand, the Chinese-made products that won't be sold in
Simon Lester 14 Apr 2024 5 min read

Free Trade and Peace Sells ... but Who's Buying?

I remain puzzled by some recent statements questioning whether free trade promotes peace. When I read another one in the Boston Review, I thought I was going to have to go through all my old rebuttals again. The article starts off this way: To many today, the idea that free
Simon Lester 07 Apr 2024 4 min read

The Role of the WTO in Planetary Sustainability

The Role of the WTO in Planetary Sustainability Steve Charnovitz 6 April 2024 Promoting planetary sustainability is within the legal competence of all multilateral organizations.  As a result, no international organization is likely to have an exclusive competence to effectuate any major sustainability goal.  A recognition of such overlapping legal
Charnovitz 06 Apr 2024 4 min read

USTR's New Vision for Foreign Trade Barriers

Last week, in the press release for its 2024 National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers, USTR said that over the years, the identification of trade barriers in this annual report has strayed from the original purpose of the statute, and that in the 2024 report it was going
Simon Lester 01 Apr 2024 4 min read

Digital Trade Fights: The Case of Korea

In recent years, the U.S. has expressed concerns about digital trade regulation in a number of other countries, with the focus tending to be on the the EU due to its large market and active regulatory efforts (although it sounds like USTR and the European Commission are getting along
Simon Lester 31 Mar 2024 3 min read

Data Flows Obligations and Exceptions in the EU - New Zealand FTA

There's a new FTA digital chapter to analyze, with the EU-New Zealand FTA coming into force soon. Let's take a look at the data flows provisions, with the EU-Japan text in the back of our minds as a comparison. The EU-NZ digital trade chapter is here.
Simon Lester 26 Mar 2024 7 min read

New U.S. AD/CVD Regulations Will Take Into Account Weak Property, IP, Human Rights, Labor, Environmental Protections

In a Proposed Rule issued last year, the U.S. Commerce Department said it would take into account "nonexistent, weak, or ineffective property (including intellectual property), human rights, labor, and environmental protections" in various ways as part of its anti-dumping/countervailing duty calculations (surrogate value selection, § 351.408;
Simon Lester 25 Mar 2024 5 min read

Guest Post: EFTA-India TEPA: Breaking New Ground

This is a guest post by Rohan, a PhD student at the Graduate Institute India and the EFTA countries (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland) signed a comprehensive Trade and Economic Partnership Agreement (TEPA) on 10th March, 2024 after a long process of negotiations that started in 2008. Notably, two disciplines
Simon Lester 24 Mar 2024 6 min read

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Guest Post: Are President Trump’s New Section 122 Tariffs Legal?

This is a guest post from Bryan Riley and Joe Bishop-Henchman. Bryan is Director of the Free Trade Initiative at the National Taxpayers Union; Joe is Executive Vice President at the National Taxpayers Union Foundation President Trump has issued new 10% tariffs, shortly after raised to 15%, based on Section
24 Feb 2026 6 min read

Section 122 as a (Partial) Replacement for the IEEPA Tariffs

Apparently, this is the era of dusting off old international economic policy statutes and figuring out what they mean and how they work. After the Supreme Court's ruling today in Learning Resources, holding that "IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs," we are now
20 Feb 2026 5 min read

Comparing the Forced Labor Provisions in the New U.S. Trade Deals

Continuing my multi-part blog posting series on comparing provisions in the Trump administration trade agreements, let's look now at the provisions that try to induce U.S. trading partners to take action against imports made with forced labor.
20 Feb 2026 4 min read

AOC on Foreign Policy and Trade Policy

AOC spoke on a couple panels last week at the Munich Security Conference and also spoke at the Technische Universität Berlin, and this European trip was widely seen as a move to establish some foreign policy credentials for a presidential run.
17 Feb 2026 12 min read

Comparing the Enforcement Provisions in the New U.S. Trade Deals

Building on the comparison of trade agreement provisions in my last post, let's take a look at the "enforcement" provisions of the six agreements for which the legal texts have been published.
11 Feb 2026 4 min read

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