This chapter examines the prominent role that Australia has played in the multilateral trading system, with a specific focus on the WTO and Australia's preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Australia has been actively involved in the WTO, through GATT and WTO negotiations, WTO committee work,...

Chapters relating to regulatory coherence or cooperation are becoming significant features in new preferential trade agreements, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). While the existing literature has considered in detail the potential for harmonisation of standards or institutional...

The growth of digital trade is dependant upon greater interconnectivity across borders. Several countries strive to achieve such interconnectivity and integration in digital trade through international trade agreements. Digital trade integration is a complex, multidimensional process that...

The global health crisis that came to be known as the COVID-19 pandemic and started to sweep across the world in early 2020 revealed many vulnerabilities in the economic, social, and political fabric underpinning what much of the world had come to accept as normal. In ways that we are still...

The relationship between the bilateral investment treaty (‘BIT') between Australia and China (1988) and the preferential trade agreement between those countries (‘ChAFTA') (2015) provides an interesting case study of the co-existence of successive treaties under public international law....

This article provides an overview of the recently concluded Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), a treaty the parties have described as comprehensive and ambitious, yet also representing a balance of competing interests. The article focuses on the TPP's chapters relating to investment,...

In this chapter, we explain and evaluate the AUSFTA primarily from an Australian perspective, given that most countries will be in a more or less analogous position to Australia when negotiating an FTA with the US. AUSFTA provides an illustration of the outcomes that countries with relatively...