The Shadows of WTO Irrelevance Steve Charnovitz 14 December 2020 On 10 December 2020, WTO Deputy Director-General Alan Wolff gave a thoughtful presentation entitled “The WTO must not continue as it is.”  In his speech, DDG Wolff warns that “if the WTO does not engage fully with environmental issues, with

This is a guest post by Susan Isiko Štrba of International Lawyers and Economists for Development: COVID-19 caused a number of learning institutions, especially in the developing world, to come to a stand still. On the other hand, developing countries faithfully domesticated international Intellectual Property (IP) standards in an effort

How quickly things change. Just a few years ago some trade lawyers were proposing that FTAs refer their disputes to the WTO DS mechanism. Now, it seems that there is a new trend – addressing what are in effect WTO disputes through FTA dispute settlement. This week, an Arbitration Panel under

When RCEP came out, analysts emphasized the importance of cumulation rules.  While many of the RCEP countries had FTAs among themselves, binding all those FTAs into a single mega-regional meant that all RCEP content would be counted for origin purposes, and this would allow products with complex RCEP value chains

China-US Dialogues in the Biden Administration 7 December 2020 An article by Brett Fortnam in Inside US Trade reports on a speech given today by China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi to the US-China Business Council.  Based on this report, I believe that Minister Wang is giving good advice

Co-authored with Sandeep Chandy The growing trade tensions between China and Australia have been widely reported in the press. In a recent manifestation of these tensions, China last Friday issued an affirmative preliminary determination regarding alleged dumping of wine from Australia, and imposed provisional duties of between 107.1% to