Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel peace Prize yesterday, for their efforts in developing the practice of micro-credit in Bangladesh for the benefit of the extreme poor, mainly women. Micro-finance is not perfect, but it is a great idea that generally works for the poor.

The other day Joel posted about the suggestion by Joseph Stiglitz that the EU should impose trade barriers on the U.S. to coerce a change in U.S. environmental policy.  Now I see that Jonathan Adler, over at the Volokh Conspiracy, has posted about a similar proposal: [according to

The full program of the ASIL International Economic Law Interest Group, November 9th-12th, at the historic Mt. Washington Resort at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, is now online. This year the conference theme is "IEL: the state and future of the discipline", and it is organized around three

It's a great pleasure to welcome Michael Ewing-Chow, one of the leading lights of the National University of Singapore Law Faculty, and Bryan Mercurio, an insightful trade law and policy analyst from University of New South Wales, as contributors to our blog.

What is “International Economic Law?”  Like many contributors to this blog, I have pronounced myself as someone who works in this area but I am a little embarrassed when my colleagues ask me to explain the big problems or major issues in the field.  Especially when they ask “what is

Daniel Kono, a political scientist at UC Davis, has an interesting article in the latest issue (100:3) of the American Political Science Review (APSR), entitled "Optimal Obfuscation: Democracy and Trade Policy Transparency" (the modest abstract follows below; the full article is available here for APSA Members and

Somebody call a lawyer. I just read that Joseph Stiglitz, in an article in the bepress.com "Economist's Voice" publication (thanks to Dan Drezner for mentioning this to me), has argued that Japan, Europe and other signatories of the Kyoto Protocol should bring a WTO case

Clay Risen writes in the current issue of The New Republic as follows: “The most significant challenge [to the liberal economic order, and to U.S. power], arising from the slow collapse of the Doha trade negotiations, is Venezuela's plan to replace the international trade structure with a

I must admit that I was disheartened as I opened the GMO panel report, and my pdf reader told me that it was 2400 pages.  It took a while to open.  The problem is not (just) the challenge to my laziness, but the fact that many of us who might

As mentioned in an earlier post, we have arranged with Anna-Emilia Autio (anna.autio@gmail.com) and Petko Kantchevski (kantche4@hei.unige.ch) to report on the panel meetings in the Hormones Sanctions cases (DS320 and DS321).  Due to the length of the meetings, it probably doesn't