International trade flows based on information. Is the foreign market open? What are the conditions for entry? Are there customs duties to be paid and other regulations that need to be satisfied? Businesses thrive on getting as much certainty as they can find, and this requires reliable...

This paper will propose a plan to reform international finance – the World Financial Authority (WFA) Plan. Under such a plan, the IMF and other existing international financial institutions would be reformed and coordinated around a newly created WFA. The WFA would have two core functions....

We provide evidence that deterioration of relations between the United States and another country, measured by divergence in their UN General Assembly voting patterns, reduces US imports from that country during the second wave of globalization. Though statistically significant, such an effect...

This note attempts to map the relevance of the emerging global law advocacy for the WTO. In this regard, it understands global law as an attempt to describe a growing decrease of the regulatory State and an ensuing increase of private rule-making. Global law intends to generate new thinking...

Despite the emphasis of international IP treaties, such as the TRIPS Agreement, on common minimum IP standards, considerable diversity exists among developing countries regarding the nature and scope of IP standards, approaches to administration and enforcement, and the responsiveness of...

The World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) is the centrepiece of the global system of rules, institutions, and practices governing the ownership and flow of knowledge, technology, and other intellectual assets. During the TRIPS...

In this paper, we investigate the role of key industry and other stakeholders and their embeddedness in particular national contexts in driving the proliferation and co-evolution of sustainability standards, based on the case of the global coffee industry. We find that institutional conditions...

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...

Trade regulation may never have been in more flux than it is nowadays. Apart from the emergence of ‘megaregionals’ (more recently, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership – RCEP, or the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-pacific Partnership–CPTPP) and the difficulties in...