As I recently tweeted, over the last 24 hours I've tried to access WTO Director General candidate Herminio Blanco's website on 4 different devices (the last one an open computer in the Swiss lounge in JFK airport, so it's nothing to do with my

It's pretty clear that the pro-seal hunt interests are hurting hard from their loss at the ECJ.  One spokesperson appeared to accuse the Court of being "self-serving" and lacking a "fair or just process."  That doesn't seem very consistent, to say the

This is from the second EU written submission in seal products: 199. Canada considers that the EU Seal Regime, through the IC exception, modifies the conditions of competition to the detriment of its imports when compared with imports of Greenland. Specifically, Canada suggests that, in the case of an origin-neutral

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