The growing stock of foreign investments by sovereign wealth funds and state-owned enterprises poses regulatory challenges to the international investment regime. With arbitrators seemingly keen on expanding the jurisdictional scope of investment treaty arbitration to cover a wide range of...

Divestment by multinational enterprises is an important yet understudied phenomenon. The few available estimates indicate that about a fifth of all foreign affiliates are divested every five years. This paper presents the findings from a novel cross-country firm-level dataset with financial and...

Neither of the major negotiations underway in the Asia-Pacific region, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, includes both China and the United States. By failing to connect these economies, these agreements would leave much of the economic and...

Emerging mega-integration blocs such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership are evolving outside of the World Trade Organization’s influence. Their most contested features are their investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) systems. This article...

This paper assesses the importance of border and non-border policies for global economic integration. The focus is on four widely-advocated policies: removing explicit restrictions to trade and FDI; promoting domestic competition; improving the adaptability of labour markets; and ensuring...

The UK Inward investment is likely to be negatively affected in several ways in the event of a "Brexit" via customs barriers, but even "softer" forms of Brexit such as the current potential agreement are likely to cause customs delays, Limits companies' ability to transfer employees and...

This is an introduction to a new development in the international arena that poses a threat to the ability of countries to tailor patent and regulatory laws to promote access to medicine. Basically, certain international agreements permit foreign companies to sue a country for compensation if...

This chapter for a forthcoming text on investment promotion explains the concept of “luring with tax”. It first lays out in broad strokes how nation states compete with each other for direct and portfolio investment using their tax systems. It then analyzes whether using the tax system as an...

This article looks at the risks inherent in foreign investment using Cambodia as an example. Companies are either investing in Cambodia to establish factories for export of garments, or are using Cambodian based suppliers for supply of garments. This development was based upon the availability...

International investment agreements (IIAs) are of great importance to investors, or at least they should be, to investors who want to be knowledgeable about how IIAs can protect against risks. Types of agreements that this article will look at are the following:1. Bilateral investment...