The World Trade Organization's law is a potentially powerful instrument for improving the labor rights of Chinese working women, if it is complemented by a broad global and multilateral approach. In contrast to much of the writing on core labor standards, this contribution is based on legal...

This paper is a contribution to the literature on rational design of trade agreements. The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an incomplete contract among sovereign states. Incomplete contracts contain gaps. Ex post, contractual gaps may leave gains from trade unrealized; they may create...

The Lisbon Treaty entered into force on December 1, 2009, marking a new level of EU’s initiatives on institutional change and policy reforms in 2000’s. The purpose of this study is to provide an outline of the changes in the institutional structure of EU with the Lisbon Treaty, considering...

The article descibes the process leading to the draft of the Model Law as discussed in 1991. The text of the draft is reproduced as Annex. The Model Law is designed to produce a comprehensive body of rules to govern relations between parties to funds transfer transactions.

Economic theory has made considerable progress in explaining why sovereign countries cooperate in trade. Central to most theories of trade cooperation are issues of self-enforcement: The threat of reprisal by an aggrieved party maintains the initial balance of concessions and prevents...

Without transparency, trade agreements are just words on paper. Transparency as disclosure allows economic actors and trading partners to see how rules are implanted; transparency in decision-making ensures fairness and peer review. In the first section of this paper, I discuss the logic of...

The WTO TBT Agreement obliges governments to use international standards as a basis for regulation, yet leaves a degree of flexibility with respect to the choice of standard, and the manner of its use. This interplay between obligation and flexibility has given rise to tension in various fora of...