Further to Simon's post, I am not an EU law expert, but I do think that, in particular, the findings of the ECJ on proportionality are relevant to the WTO dispute.  Here they are: Second, the applicants’ argument that the basic regulation goes beyond what is necessary to

From CTV: A court has upheld the European Union's three-year-old ban on seal products, dealing another blow to Canada's embattled sealing industry. The General Court of the European Union issued a statement today saying it has rejected a challenge from a group that included the Canadian

These days trade faciltiation is an oft-repeated mantra in WTO circles, including by the DG candidates.  But there is little commentary to be found by civil society groups on these negotiations or the draft texts (the latest, from the end of March can be found here:  http://bit.ly/XXyaEA.

A recent article argues that a lot of them are: we hypothesize that SPS notification activity is correlated with the amount of protectionism afforded traded agricultural products and with the level of demand for protectionism by agricultural producers. To test our claims, we assemble a dataset recording the annual number

This is from a new Peterson Institute paper: In a recent book, The Cost Disease: Why Computers Get Cheaper and Health Care Doesn’t, William Baumol reports some arresting numbers to illustrate the spiraling cost of key services which are plagued by slow productivity growth. Since the 1980s, the price

A couple months ago, I mentioned a new proposal for a Multilateral Investment Agreement.  Axel Berger of the Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) has a skeptical response here.  An excerpt: The shortcomings of the current investment regime can be better dealt with in the context of regional negotiations; these should,

The United States is now entering into the negotiation of an ambitious agreement on trade and economic cooperation with the  EU.  But do the Administration and Congress really know the man who will be sitting on the other side of the negotiating table, Karel De Gucht? Searching for more clues

From the EU second written submission: There's a policy issue here which may not have been in the drafters' minds when they wrote the definition of "technical regulation".  When you ban an input product, are you therefore regulating all finished products that use the input?

Thank you for your response to my post. Let's start with the facts.  The Chair himself has said that there was a "deviation" from the procedure agreed.  You, however, begin rhetorically, by referring to "conspiracies."  I never used that word.  Instead I offered a

Tomorrow (April 22) the International Chamber of Commerce will hold its World Trade Agenda Summit in,of all places, Doha, Qatar. A key document for the Summit is a report produced under the auspices of the Peterson Institute, a kind of updated catechism of neo-liberalism, "Payoff From the World