The WTO announced today that the European Union and 10 Latin American countries signed an agreement settling the longest-running series of disputes in the history of the multilateral trading system.  DSB chairman Shahid Bashir noted: One positive feature of the disputes is that they have provided a “rich source

Hope to see some of you blog readers at the following ASIL event: Re-Conceptualizing International Economic Law: Bridging the Public/Private Divide November 29, 2012 ~ December 01, 2012 George Washington University School of Law Stockton Hall, Room 305, 720 20th Street, NW Washington DC 20431 USA   The ASIL International

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

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