Can supranational actors influence domestic policy? In this article, we study how international organizations have sought to shape the contents of domestic laws aimed at protecting foreign investment. Traditionally, the influence of international organizations on public policy has been assumed to run through loan conditionalities. We build on a recent strand of literature indicating that international organizations can also influence public policy through technical assistance. Empirically, we present a cross-sectional mapping of the protection that states offer foreign investors in domestic investment laws, and a mapping of the advisory activities of the three main organizations offering technical assistance on foreign investment laws: the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the World Bank. We find that there are significant variations in protection offered under domestic investment laws, and variation in international organizations’ technical assistance over time and across organizations. To explore technical assistance as a causal mechanism for influence on public policy more closely in this field, we conduct a case study of the development of domestic investment legislation in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The article analyses investment rulemaking in new Asian regionalism in the context of evolving national legislation and regional trade strategies. It argues that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) represent Asia's pragmatic incrementalism in reforming the investment regime. The process reinforces the relationship between international economic law and domestic investment laws. In tandem with transforming international investment agreements, ASEAN expedited investment and services trade, and established the modern investor–state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism. The RCEP further buttresses the ASEAN centrality in regional frameworks by consolidating ASEAN Plus One agreements. Yet, the RCEP's omission of ISDS reflects a distinct approach that may confront challenges to state-to-state proceedings and treaty shopping under overlapping pacts. Finally, the research sheds light on Asian countries' recent investment agreements and domestic dispute settlement that complement the liberal international order. These developments provide valuable models for developing countries and contribute to the understanding of global investment reforms from an Asian perspective.

This article critically examines the proposed waiver of intellectual property (IP) rights for COVID-19 vaccines under the World Trade Organization Agreement's Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which was initiated in October 2020 when the pandemic raged and vaccines were unavailable. However, the landscape has now changed and the waiver may no longer be necessary. The Outcome Document, introduced in the TRIPS Council in May 2022, along with Ministerial Decision of June 2022 recognizes this by focusing on easing the requirements to use TRIPS-flexibilities to accomplish wider and cheaper access. In so doing, the Ministerial Decision reinforces the notion that TRIPS flexibilities can be a useful part of the policy toolkit, even in times of crisis. After providing an overview of the context and outlining justifications for the waiver proposal, the article analyses and identifies key implications and possible effects of the Ministerial Decision. The article concludes that while the Document may not be a perfect solution to the issue of access to vaccines, flexible application of TRIPS-flexibilities is a better resolution in the current environment, especially given the need for further innovation to combat COVID-19 and future pandemics.

This paper examines the economic implications of the tariff increases by the United States and by China during the Trump era trade dispute and the gains from their potential removal. The increases were dramatic, with the US raising tariffs on industrial products by a factor of six – with particularly large tariff increases on intermediate and capital goods – and China increasing its tariffs on US agricultural products more than five-fold. These changes distort trade and production decisions in both countries and undercut the global trading system. They resulted in substantial economic losses to each country, with import volumes reduced by 4.9% in China and 4.5% in the USA, and bilateral trade patterns were massively distorted. Their cost to the United States rose at the end of 2021, when the import expansion provisions of the Trump era Phase One Agreement expired. Negotiating the abolition of these costly and disruptive tariffs would generate substantial real income gains for both countries and help lower US consumer prices.

The last decade has witnessed the emergence and rise of trade disputes over renewable energy support measures. By pitting trade against the environment, these disputes ignited a considerable debate over the adequacy of the green policy space available under WTO law. This article examines whether and to what extent the first ten years of litigation settled the key issues in this debate by undertaking a systematic analysis of the developments in the case law and in the renewable energy policy landscape. The analysis reveals that the case law has raised more questions than answers and much uncertainty remains as to the scope of the policy space available for the subsidization of renewables. It also highlights how these disputes steered the debate away from the most contentious issue of subsidy regulation to the slam-dunk issue of non-discrimination. In doing so, they helped conceal rather than resolve the green policy space deficit in multilateral renewable energy subsidy governance.

The dispute settlement system of the World Trade Organization (WTO) knew considerable success in its early years, being described as the WTO's crown jewel. In recent years, the jewel has become tarnished. Its principal actor – the Appellate Body – is no longer functioning, and the practice of the membership has been to appeal almost all new panel reports, thereby consigning them to a legal limbo from which they seem unlikely to ever emerge. This paper briefly reviews the record of the WTO dispute settlement system, considers the problems that led to its current state and evaluates various proposals that have been made to reinvigorate the system.

During the first wave of globalization, Argentina was among the most internationally integrated economies, experiencing a rising trend in trade openness and a tremendous increase in labor due to migration. In this paper, we empirically show the central role immigration had in boosting exports and imports in the years 1870–1913 by considering Argentine bilateral trade and migration from eight European countries (Austro-Hungarian Empire, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and United Kingdom). We use a migration-augmented gravity model to estimate the contribution of the massive inflows of Europeans, and we find that the main pro-trade effect was on imports: a percent 10% increase in migrants from a particular country would increase imports by up to 8% from that same country. We do not find the same effect on exports. The disproportionate decrease in transportation rather than communication costs may explain why the latter are relatively more decisive for exports than for imports. To overcome the problem of reverse causality and endogeneity, we use migration flows to the US from the eight European countries as an instrumental variable. In so doing, we aim at capturing the same push (but not Argentine pull) factors inducing European out-migration.

With the benefit of hindsight, much scholarship across political science, law, and economics has told the story of the international trade regime as if it had been pulled all along by a definite aim. By contrast, this article emphasizes the contingent aspects of the trade regime's development, looking especially to its dispute settlement mechanism. The very creation of the Appellate Body had by no means a certain outcome, and once created, the tribunal's evolution was largely unanticipated by states. An often-overlooked actor played a key role in that development: the WTO Secretariat. Drawing on recent findings, this article lays out the full extent of the Secretariat's role in dispute settlement, which remains largely hidden from view, and deliberately so. From appointing adjudicators and managing their remuneration, to providing them with legal arguments and drafting final rulings, the Secretariat of the WTO looms larger than in any comparable tribunal. Making its influence more transparent, I argue, would go a long way to returning the system to the shape it was designed to have at its outset.

Decades of negotiation to extend the GATT/WTO system to address subsidies have never produced the sort of uniform, scheduled rules that apply to tariffs or even services. Instead, WTO members have developed rules to demarcate permissible and impermissible subsidies. In this paper, I argue that the WTO approach is now hampered by shifts in the share of global trade away from geopolitically aligned, wealthy states and the growth of global supply chains. These pressures were magnified by the accession of China, with its centrality to global trade and recurrent geopolitical tensions with the United States. The challenges in facing cooperation over subsidies suggest limits to the ability for a ‘rules based’ approach to handle substantial changes in the global trading system.

Although globalization and the world trade regime have reduced the significance of distance between countries, within countries geography matters now more than ever. Inside countries’ borders, economic activities, such as production and employment, occur unevenly across space. As a result, international trade impacts parts of a country differently. Some areas benefit from rising trade, while others experience reductions in local wages and employment as a result of increased import competition. Because regions’ experience of globalization varies, public opinion about trade differs across geographic areas within countries. Voters living in regions advantaged by trade are more likely to support economic openness, while voters living in regions negatively impacted by trade are more skeptical of the benefits of globalization. The geographic disparities in public attitudes towards trade often align with salient political cleavages. As a result, debates over trade have become increasingly polarized in many countries, which may threaten states’ continued economic openness as well as their engagement with, and even support for, the world trade regime.

Why are highly educated people more supportive of international trade? Two competing explanations exist for this empirical finding. On the one hand, the economic interest approach suggests that the highly educated realize that trade can benefit them economically. On the other hand, the ideational perspective argues that this relationship arises because highly educated people are more cosmopolitan, and cosmopolitanism is positively related to support for trade. To contribute to this debate on the education–trade attitude nexus, we present and empirically test four hypotheses. Using data from the PEW Global Attitudes survey (2014) for 36 countries at various levels of development, we find that as expected by the economic interest approach, the effect of education on people's perceptions of the consequences of trade is conditional on respondents’ individual and subnational economic context. The results thus show that economic interest at least partly explains education's effects on public opinion towards trade. Beyond adding to this specific debate, the research note makes several broader contributions to research on trade and public opinion.

The article explains that the interpretation of the TRIPS Agreement by WTO dispute-settlement panels and the Appellate Body has palpably shifted since the establishment of the WTO in 1995. Some of this shift is also arguably present in disputes concerning other WTO instruments. This progressive shift comes at a time when key debates about TRIPS waivers are taking place on the rue de Lausanne, namely a first for the COVID-19 pandemic and a second possible one for environmental protection measures related to climate change. According to the proposed pluralist analysis of TRIPS, it was less likely as of 2020 that the WTO dispute-settlement system would find unjustifiable inconsistencies between WTO commitments, on the one hand, and measures to protect public health or mitigate climate change, on the other hand. Whether future Appellate Body will follow that jurisprudence is an open question. Though the analysis contained in the article may make the COVID-related TRIPS waivers doctrinally unnecessary and allow Members to take measures now, its main aim is to inform the debates about the waivers and the future interpretation of the TRIPS Agreement, including the three-step test.

In India–Export Related Measures, the United States challenged a range of Indian measures as prohibited export-contingent subsidies, and a WTO panel largely agreed. This article examines the factors at play in the United States’ decision to bring the challenge. At the level of policy, the United States case reflects India's graduation from the protections afforded developing nations’ export-contingent subsidies under the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures. A closer examination, however, shows that India ramped up its export-contingent subsidies just as the SCM Agreement required it to wind those subsidies down. Moreover, the expanded Indian subsidies led to increased import competition with the politically influential metals and pharmaceutical sectors in the United States, which pushed the US challenge. We reflect on the larger implications of the challenge for the future of trade rules on industrial policy. In particular, we note that the United States pursued a trade enforcement policy that would have the effect of increasing pharmaceutical prices in the United States, by reducing subsidies for imported generic drugs, at a time when the Trump administration allegedly was trying to reduce the price of prescription drugs. This disconnect suggests the need for both greater transparency in trade policy and greater governmental coordination on the connection between trade policy and other policy priorities.

This article offers the justification for a type of carbon customs union in which countries with a diverse range of high-ambition domestic climate measures would adopt a common external tariff on carbon intensive imports from countries outside the union. We explain why any pragmatic approach to carbon border measures (CBMs) is likely to create problems under prevailing interpretations of the World Trade Organization's (WTO) primary rules. Given the urgency of the climate crisis and the fact that the legality of a CBM – no matter how designed – will be a question of first impression for any WTO dispute panel, WTO consistency should take a backseat to considerations of domestic legal and political feasibility in designing a CBM. Instead of trying to fit a CBM into current understandings of WTO rules, WTO members should renegotiate WTO rules to permit a range of aggressive, but likely trade-restrictive, decarbonization measures. Having said that, we also recognize that WTO negotiations may take longer than optimal from a decarbonization standpoint. We therefore suggest an approach that would allow WTO members to take advantage of flexibilities that existing WTO rules afford.

Chapter 23, exclusively dedicated to labor protection, has been widely described as one of the most distinctive features of the new US–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA). This paper challenges the current narrative surrounding the USMCA by critically analysing Chapter 23 of the agreement, looking at the legal innovative design of its substantive commitments of labour protection and their enforceability. In light of this objective, a comparative analysis will be conducted. The provisions of Chapter 23 USMCA will be compared with labour provisions in previous US Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs), namely, the NAFTA side agreement on labour rights and the TPP. Second, a comparative analysis will be conducted comparing USMCA Chapter 23 with labour provisions in EU Trade Agreements negotiated with USMCA parties. The paper demonstrates that although the USMCA does not radically innovate from the level of substantive labour protection reached in recent US and EU PTAs, the enforcement mechanism in the USMCA is significantly strengthened, with controversial and innovative features.

This paper reviews the World Trade Organization (WTO) Panel Report Russia – Measures Concerning Traffic in Transit of April 2019. It constitutes the first attempt to disentangle the legal and political aspects related to the invoked essential security interests from the economic considerations underlying the measures imposed on the transit through Russia of goods exported from Ukraine to the Republic of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. One the one hand, the panel's interpretation of Article XXI of the GATT denies Members unilateral determination over security exceptions. It further enables a pathway for future WTO panels to review possible abuses of security exceptions – a growing concern due to the rising complexity of transnational economic relations. On the other hand, our economic analysis suggests a stricter assessment of Russia's transit restrictions was necessary. In particular, it argues that the panel adopted a circular assessment when considering the plausibility of whether Russia implemented its measures for the protection of its essential security interests at a time of emergency in international relations. Ultimately, although the panel's focus on finding a diplomatic and legal path forward failed economic scrutiny a legal assessment argues that the panel's findings fit the legal design of Article XXI:b of the GATT.

Typically, the WTO Arbitrator, when charged with evaluating the permissible level of countermeasures (suspension of concessions), has chosen a counterfactual state of the world where the challenged (illegal) measure has not been adopted at all. The Arbitrator then would calculate the trade lost because of the adopted (illegal) measure, and thus, decide on the level of permissible countermeasures. In US–Washing Machines (Article 22.6-US), deviating from this custom, the Arbitrator adopted a different counterfactual, assuming that the complainant had adopted a different, ‘reasonable’ measure. The Arbitrator then evaluated the trade lost based on the distance between the adopted (illegal) and the ‘reasonable’ measure and calculated the level of countermeasures. In this paper, we explain the multitude of perils facing dispute settlement if this approach is adopted in future disputes. We also advance a few thoughts on rethinking the workings of the Arbitrator when measuring the level of permissible countermeasures, since similar slippery slopes risk being reproduced in future cases.

This article analyses economic and legal issues in the WTO dispute between Morocco and Turkey over hot-rolled steel. Over 2013–2014, the Moroccan government conducted an antidumping investigation against two Turkish steel producers. Morocco's investigation concluded that Turkish dumping was retarding the establishment of a new domestic industry; antidumping duties were imposed against both Turkish producers. Turkey filed a complaint at the WTO in 2016, asserting procedural and substantive violations. The Panel found that Morocco had acted inconsistently with a number of WTO obligations, including those regarding its injury investigation. Although Morocco initially appealed the Panel's decision, it withdrew its appeal after the antidumping duties expired in September 2019. This case is unusual and important in that it was the first antidumping case in which a country sought to use antidumping duties to protect a newly developing industry. The Panel may have missed an opportunity to explore the definition of an ‘unestablished’ industry for purposes of determining injury in an antidumping investigation.