This paper examines whether private actors can rely upon WTO Agreements and rulings when challenging the legality of actions taken by a WTO member before that member's domestic court, with special attention to the cases on trade remedies law, such as antidumping and subsidies countervailing...

A prerequisite for receiving protection through investment arbitration for foreign investments under investment protection treaties is that the investments concerned satisfy the definitions of "investor" and "investment" in those treaties. To date, however, the interpretation of provisions...

The recent development in the international rules and procedures for investment protection, caused by the spread of bilateral investment treaties and the use of investment arbitration, has remarkably reduced foreign investors' risks. At the same time, however, there is concern for the erosion of...

There are some 2,800 international investment agreements (IIAs) that provide rules for protecting foreign investment from other contracting parties. When disputes occur between a foreign investor and a host state government, most IIAs allow investors to bring a case before an arbitral tribunal...

Globalization of business leads to environmental uncertainty for corporate organizations. To establish competitive advantage, organizations need continuous introduction of new products and services to markets and quick implementation of new strategies. This paper shows what kinds of initiatives...

A decomposition of the gender gap in earned income among white-collar regular employees in Japan was conducted using the DiNardo-Fortin-Lemieux method based on propensity-score weighting. The results show that gender differences in three human-capital variables, namely, education, age, and the...

This paper has constructed a theoretical model to explain why the share of those who remain unmarried has increased in Japan. It is still common for women to leave the labor market due to marriage and thereby see an irreversible decrease in their income. Taking into consideration of the...

Employing massive contract- and firm-level data provided by the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) Unit of the Japan Finance Corporation (JFC), one of the largest government lending institutions for SMEs, and linking the data with other firm-level data from a business credit information company,...

In treaty-based investment arbitration, tribunals quite often render their awards referring to the protection of the investor's legitimate expectations. A number of tribunals deal with this issue in the context of the application of the fair and equitable treatment clause and argue that the...

Japanese labor and employment law is based on the "command-and-control" model in which the government sets uniform minimum labor standards and enforces them through penalties and administrative inspections while leaving the determination of above-the-standard working conditions to employers,...