International Economic Law and Policy Blog (Page 483)

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"Illegal Subsidies" versus "Legal Inducements"

From a statement by John Edwards to the Iowa Fair Trade Campaign: And our trade deals must include prohibitions against illegal subsidies and currency manipulation and other trade cheating of the sort that is in fact encouraged under most of our current arrangements, to the detriment of American farmers, workers

Trade in Everything (New Year's Eve Edition): (Alleged) Hallucinogens

From the Palm Beach Post: Blame Johnny Depp's dazed bathtub scene in 2001's From Hell for making absinthe popular. Blame the fall of the Berlin Wall for making it available. It was the post-Soviet Czech Republic that gleefully jumped on the absinthe manufacturing bandwagon. The

UN sanctions: are authorizations sufficient? The House of Lords speaks

On 12 December the House of Lords delivered its long-awaited judgment in Al-Jeddah, which is to do with the application of the ECHR to a person detained in a UK detention facility in Iraq. One of the issues concerned the scope of Article 103 of the UN Charter

Paul Krugman on The "Trouble With Trade"

Paul Krugman has not had much to say about trade (that I've seen) in his op-ed columns, but today he writes: For the world economy as a whole — and especially for poorer nations — growing trade between high-wage and low-wage countries is a very good thing.

Some Support for a WTO Agreement on Currency Manipulation

I've said before on this blog (see, e.g. here) that WTO rules on exchange rate manipulation would be useful. I didn't have any detailed proposal in mind; it was my gut instinct plus some very basic arguments. Well, now I can cite to some top-

The Chinese Film Ban (If It Existed) No Longer Exists

The Chinese film ban, if there was one, is apparently over: China's blackout of Hollywood films has been broken by the Will Smith starrer "The Pursuit of Happyness," which Chinese film import officials now say will be released here in January. ... 'Happiness Knocks at the

Some Exchange Rate Items of Interest

Here are two unrelated items about exchange rates: 1. From Marginal Revolution: Canadian shoppers taking advantage of the parity between the U.S. and Canadian dollars are leaving behind more than cash when the head home. They're leaving behind their old clothes. Some Canadian shoppers wear their new

Trade in Everything: Christmas Trees

Typepad has a nice feature that lets you schedule a post for publication at a later date, so I'm scheduling this for Christmas day. Two items to note: From the FT, "Fir flies as Danish Xmas tree growers charged": Denmark’s Christmas tree growers, the biggest

The Gambling Arbitration: US$21 Million Per Year

From the Award: 6.1 For the reasons set out above, the Arbitrator determines that the annual level of nullification or impairment of benefits accuing to Antigua in this case is US$21 million and that Antigua has followed the principles and procedures of Article 22.3 of the DSU

The Light Bulb Ban

I was a bit surprised by the ban on incandescent light bulbs in the U.S. energy bill (probably because I hadn't been following the legislation very closely). Usually regulation of this sort consists of higher standards, or maybe occasionally additional taxes, but here we have an outright