Despite major advancements in the Japan-EU FTA (JEUFTA) negotiations, the talks remain difficult in the railway sector. These difficulties flow largely from the fact that the Japanese railways are organized on a radically different legal and economic basis than the railway systems in the EU....

While there is an increasing demand for a discipline in the next generation FTAs that restricts SOEs in international trade, there is less debate on the proliferation of sovereign patent funds (SPFs) that are increasingly using intellectual property to engage in discriminatory industrial policy...