International Economic Law and Policy Blog

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Trade Preferences/GSP

23 posts

Collective Economic Security

Collective Economic Security By Mona Paulsen (LSE Law) and Dan Ciuriak (C.D. Howe (Senior Fellow)) With a flurry of pomp and circumstance, the second Trump administration has reset United States trade with its trading partners. Based on U.S. laws that afford wide Executive discretion towards trade actions owing

GSP and GSP Conditionality under the Trump Administration

I am somewhat of a skeptic on giving tariff preferences to developing countries, because my instinct is that discrimination in trade relations is bad and should generally be avoided. But with GSP programs, the goal is development and the means is lowering tariffs, and I can see how there would

Guest Post: Background and Impact of US’s intention to “terminate” GSP benefits to India

This is a guest post by Vineet Hegde, a PhD researcher in International Law at the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies at KU Leuven, Belgium. In the previous post by Simon Lester, he wrote about USTR’s decision to “terminate” GSP preferences to India. This is a second post

U.S. Terminates GSP Benefits for India and Turkey

This is from USTR: At the direction of President Donald J. Trump, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer announced today that the United States intends to terminate India’s and Turkey’s designations as beneficiary developing countries under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) program because they no longer comply

New AU funding system and the WTO

At its July 2016 summit in Kigali, Rwanda, the AU Assembly held a special retreat to consider new proposals intended to ensure that the AU “is financed in a predictable, sustainable, equitable and accountable manner with the full ownership by its Member States”. The new funding proposal adopted by the

GSP Withdrawal to Enforce Investment Arbitration Awards

Roger Alford has an interesting post over at Opinio Juris (based on an article), in which he discusses the withdrawal of GSP benefits as a way to induce compliance with investment arbitration awards. To illustrate this situation, let's say a government has previously offered lower tariffs to a

Which "Developing" Countries Should Benefit from Tariff Preferences?

The EU is rethinking things: The European Union intends to increase tariffs on developing countries including China, India and Brazil under a plan to give only the neediest nations preferential access to the world’s biggest market. The European Commission proposed to deny faster-growing emerging economies tariff reductions granted through

Making GSP More "Rule-Oriented"

Lorand Bartels and Christian Haeberli have an interesting article on GSP in the latest edition of the JIEL, in which they propose two ways "to increase the security and predictability of these preferential schemes, permitting decisions by investors and traders to be taken without fear of an arbitrary withdrawal

GSP and the U.S. Sleeping Bag Industry

Reuters reports: Valuable U.S. trade benefits for about 130 developing countries could expire at the end of the year because of a Republican senator's objection to duty-free treatment for sleeping bags from Bangladesh. With Congress hoping to finish its work this week, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions is

Sallie James on GSP

Sallie James of Cato has a good piece on the U.S. GSP program. Here are some snippets. The opening salvo: To the extent that preference recipients jealously guard their special access and resist global efforts to liberalize trade on a nondiscriminatory basis, unilateral preference programs can be counterproductive to