Compliance Politics and International Investment Disputes : A New Dataset

The ability to ensure compliance with investor-state arbitral awards is often regarded as one of the strengths of the international investment regime. Yet there have been few systematic studies of compliance to assess the extent to which states have actually complied with adverse investor-state compensation awards. This paper presents a new dataset that enables empirical research on compliance with investor-state arbitration awards; it is the first dataset to focus on what happens after awards are handed down, and in this way complements other databases on international investment law. This paper explains the data collection process (and its associated challenges) as well as the design choices made in selecting inputs and variables, which should be considered by researchers seeking to draw conclusions from the data. The paper discusses cases as illustrations of the challenges of collecting data and coding data on post-award processes, and also presents a descriptive overview of the data