All of you academics out there are probably familiar with MOOCs by now -- Massive Open Online Courses.  Both the NY Times and Washington Post had articles on them this past week-end, if you need some background. I'm excited about the concept, and I'm in the

Article : Epistemic Contests and Legitimacy of the World Trade Organization: The Brazil – USA Cotton Dispute and Incremental Balancing of Global Interests, 4(1) Trade, L. & Dev. 200 (2012) [available here] Reply by Arthur Daemmrich “I say that the just is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger.” Thrasymachus

Inside U.S. Trade reports here on concerns related to Ukraine's invocation of GATT Article XXVIII to renegotiate many of its tariffs.  The consensus on this issue seems to be that Ukraine is not violating GATT rules (not yet, anyway), and thus a complaint won't help.

This is former AB Member Jim Bacchus, writing in the International Business Times: Ordinarily, for all the reasons [Adam] Smith gave us, subsidies should be avoided, and the matter of sorting out our sources of energy should be left to free trade and to free competition in the marketplace. But

Has anyone been following the UN negotiations over a new Arms Trade Treaty? Colleagues of mine from the Graduate Institute in Geneva actually attended the July 2-27, 2012 negotiations in New York and wrote this interesting report about the conference’s failure (apparently: US and Russia to blame) as well

The editors at Bloomberg have a short piece in which they criticize unilateral action against alleged Chinese currency manipulation.  They say we need to take multilateral action instead: ... China does manipulate its currency. By deliberately holding down the exchange rate of the renminbi, it has made its exports artificially cheap

The WTO web site now has clean PDFs of the original GATT Analytical Index: http://www.wto.org/english/res_e/booksp_e/gatt_ai_e/gatt_ai_e.htm Thanks to Amy Porges for the tip, and lots of hard work preparing the files!

Article : Epistemic Contests and Legitimacy of the World Trade Organization: The Brazil – USA Cotton Dispute and Incremental Balancing of Global Interests, 4(1) Trade, L. & Dev. 200 (2012) [available here] Author : Arthur Daemmrich Comment by Joost Pauwelyn This paper is ultimately about legitimacy.  The core argument is that the

Article : Epistemic Contests and Legitimacy of the World Trade Organization: The Brazil – USA Cotton Dispute and Incremental Balancing of Global Interests, 4(1) Trade, L. & Dev. 200 (2012) [available here] Author : Arthur Daemmrich Reviewer : Joost Pauwelyn Introduction to the article, by Simon Lester There is a long-standing debate involving

After reading the previous post by Simon and the comment by Srikar, I am wondering what WTO provisions could be invoked by a complainant if supermarkets in France set up shelves with purely French products. First, following the relevant comment by Srikar, it is useful to emphasize that if Montebourg’