It is a truth universally acknowledged that every ambitious 21st century trade agreement is in want of a chapter on electronic commerce. One of the most politically sensitive and technically challenging issues is personal privacy, including cross-border transfer of information by electronic...

After the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) of 1997-99, a dominant orthodoxy arose both in regional diplomatic circles and the regional scholarship that analysed it, that the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) had established the institutional basis both for South East Asian as well as...

In this paper we claim that, in the WTO Appellate Body (AB)'s ruling in US — Countervailing Measures (China), the AB decision has not put in question the practice of imposing countervailing duties (CVDs). While the US has formally “lost” the case, a change in the procedures and tests used...

Governments increasingly are seeking to use bilateral and regional trade agreements to reduce the cost-increasing effects of differences in product market regulation. They also pursue regulatory cooperation independent of trade agreements. It is important to understand what is being done through...

This chapter offers a perspective on the legal aspects of U.S.-China trade relations, focusing on how the rise of China has challenged U.S. perspectives and principles. There are serious issues raised by the interface between China's state-controlled economy and the U.S. privately-controlled...

The WTO has struggled with the treatment of nonmarket economies (NMEs). What was a nonissue in the original GATT (because of the homogeneity of participants) became quite an issue with the accession of formally centrally planned economies, which were not transformed to market economies, at least...

By acting as a trader, a State may influence the direction of international trade through its purchases and sales decisions without resort to other more direct means of intervention such as the application of tariffs and quotas. The GATT recognizes that States may choose to participate in...

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) are a major force in the Chinese economy and a growing presence in international trade and investment. The challenge to the WTO legal regime is commercial, given their size and their share of Chinese output, and political, given worries that trade and investment by...

The EU—Fatty Alcohols decision of the Appellate Body addressed an important issue of the scope of permissible adjustments under Article 2.4 of the Agreement on Interpretation of Article VI of the GATT 1994, focusing on the “mark-up” paid by an Indonesian exporter to a related company as a...