Senator Clinton apparently has introduced legislation that would bar firms owned by foreign states from managing US ports. The bill is aimed at the takeover of P & O, a company that currently manages six US ports, by Dubai Ports World, which belongs to the United Arab Emirates. The purported

The U.S. Treasury is considering whether to label China a "currency manipulator."  Apparently, this designation would have certain effects under 22 U.S.C. 5304, 5305 and 286y .  A 2005 Treasury report states that Title 22 U.S.C. 5304 requires, inter alia, that the Secretary of

Mittal is playing the WTO card on the French steel investment issue, courtesy of Kamal Nath, Indian trade minister (see Reuters report). From the sidelines, and without any prejudice to the merits of the Indian claims themselves, there is something poetically just about this development. See how Nath almost gleefully

On February 14, 2006 the USTR released a comprehensive review of the U.S.-China trade relation in a report titled “U.S.-China Trade Relations: Entering a New Phase of Greater Accountability and Enforcement.” (http://www.ustr.gov/assets/Document_Library/Reports_Publications/2006/asset_upload_file921_8938.pdf)

Ineresting story in yesterday's NEW YORK TIMES (p. A6). Bristol-Myers is to allow the newest and most powerful AIDS drug (atanazavir - a second line treatment for those who have developed resistance to their first anti-viral cocktails) to be licensed to generic drug makers in India and South

Trade and Environment in the European Court Over the last couple of years the ECJ has issued some interesting judgments on trade and environment. The most recent - Case C-320/03 of 25th November 2005 Commission v. Austria - concerns an Austrian measure to prohibit lorries of more than 7.

With the excellent addition of Tomer Broude and Sungjoon Cho, we now have a large enough group to keep things interesting.  I look forward to their stimulating posts.

WTO Director General Pascal Lamy is doing an on-line chat with the global public on February 21.  It's easy to be cyncial about such gestures--the "digital divide," the limits of the medium for serious deliberation, the self-selectivity of participants, etc., but let's hand it

Joel, our leader, has indicated that it is okay to use the blog for self-promotion (well, those weren't exactly his words) but anyhow  I thought I would mention that a new edition of my treatise with Michael Trebilcock, The Regulation of International Trade, was published in the fall,

Our own Petros Mavroidis, with Henrik Horn, has created data (well, not really created, so much as gathered).  It is available from the World Bank, which sponsored the research, at www.worldbank.org/trade/wtodisputes.  The manual describes the data as follows "[A] data set covering various aspects of