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Bernanke on Trade Imbalances

In a recent speech on "Asia and the Global Financial Crisis," Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke made this point about trade: Because strong export markets helped Asia recover from that crisis, and because many countries in the region were badly hurt by sharp reversals in capital flows, the crisis
Simon Lester 21 Oct 2009 3 min read

Competitive Trade Liberalization in Action

From the Korea Herald: The Korea-U.S. free-trade agreement should be ratified before tariffs on goods from the European Union get cut in Asia's fourth-largest economy, president of the American business lobby group here said yesterday. "I don't want to see tariffs on EU goods
Simon Lester 19 Oct 2009 1 min read

EC Considers Removing GSP+ Tariff Preferences for Sri Lanka

From the European Commission: The Commission has completed a thorough investigation into the human rights situation in Sri Lanka and in particular whether Sri Lanka is living up to the commitments it made to respect international human rights standards when it became a beneficiary of the European Union's
Simon Lester 19 Oct 2009 1 min read

Symposium and Web Site on International Investment and ADR

New from Washington and Lee / UNCTAD: Washington and Lee University School of Law and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) cordially invite you to attend the Joint Symposium on International Investment Law and Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR). The purpose of the Joint Symposium is to explore the
Simon Lester 18 Oct 2009 1 min read

More Investor-State Debate

Following up on this post, the State Department's Advisory Committee on International Economic Policy (ACIEP) recently held a review of the U.S. Model BIT.  The report issued by the Committee has a discussion of many issues under BITs, including the investor-state dispute mechanism.  It's too
Simon Lester 18 Oct 2009 3 min read

Fred Bergsten on Currency Undervaluation

From an article entitled "The Dollar and the Deficits: How Washington Can Prevent the Next Crisis": A central goal of US foreign economic policy must be to prevent and counter deliberate currency undervaluations by other major countries, which keep the dollar overvalued and harm US competitiveness. China has
Simon Lester 16 Oct 2009 2 min read

A Contrario Update

For those of you familiar with the "a contrario" argument in relation to the SCM Agreement illustrative list, I thought this passage from the U.S. - Cotton Article 4.11 arbitration would be of interest: 4.161 Thirdly, we do not consider that there is any legitimate
Simon Lester 16 Oct 2009 1 min read

Lamy on Services Liberalization

From a recent speech by WTO DG Pascal Lamy: Trade, or more specifically financial services liberalization, was neither a villain nor a cause of this crisis but a casualty. As you all know, in the world of the GATS, “liberalization” is essentially about opening specified sectors to competition on a
Simon Lester 14 Oct 2009 1 min read

Climate Change Measures and Lost Oil Exports

I have often wondered how oil producing countries would react to lost oil exports if other countries ever begin to take serious action to shift to renewable energy.  So far, very little has been done in this regard, so it has not been a big issue.  But it does seem
Simon Lester 14 Oct 2009 1 min read

How Do You Like Your Chicken: With or Without Chemicals?

Roughly speaking, that's the issue in the EC - Measures Affecting Poultry Meat WTO dispute (DS389), for which the U.S. recently announced it will request a panel. The panel request describes the issue as follows: The EC prohibits the import of poultry treated with any substance other
Simon Lester 13 Oct 2009 3 min read

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International Economic Law and Policy Blog

International Economic Law and Policy Blog

Expert commentary on the law, politics and economics of international trade and investment

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Is There No Going Back on Trade? What Is the Path Forward? A Response to Lighthizer

Former U.S. Trade Rep. Bob Lighthizer has a new essay in Foreign Affairs, and I have some thoughts. I'm going to start with his brief big picture points on the direction of U.S. trade policy, and then go through a couple of the specific concepts he emphasizes.
27 Apr 2026 6 min read

The Section 301 Excess Capacity Investigation Needs Less Madness, More Method

Shortly after the Supreme Court ruled President Trump’s emergency tariffs under IEEPA  unconstitutional, the administration scrambled to rebuild its tariff wall. While the announcement of Section 122 tariffs immediately following the ruling will provide a temporary patch, the U.S. Trade Representative’s office quickly began to utilize another
24 Apr 2026 6 min read

War Tariffs

This is a co-authored post by Kathleen Claussen and Tim Meyer. Last week, President Trump announced that the United States would be imposing new tariffs of 50 percent of the value of any product coming from any country that sells weapons or provides military aid to Iran. Some commentators questioned
14 Apr 2026 5 min read

USMCA Review and Extension Predictions

When the idea of an expiration clause was suggested during the NAFTA renegotiation, I was against it from the start, and Inu and I wrote a pretty critical piece about it at the time. A review is great, we said, let's definitely have reviews, and there are plenty of ways to do that.
08 Apr 2026 5 min read

The Section 301 Surge Continues: Investigating the Adoption/Enforcement/Administration of Forced Labor Import Bans

This Section 301 investigation intends to pressure all sixty named trade partners (even, inexplicably, including Canada and Mexico) to adopt similar enforcement procedures. This announcement is highly problematic for the four reasons I address below.
16 Mar 2026 4 min read

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