There is already a substantial body of literature on the reform of the whole landscape of International Investment Agreements (IIAs). Recent UNCTAD's work in this area (in particular the Investment Policy Framework for Sustainable Development – IPSFD) is welcomed and is promising. However,...

The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) under the WTO is a newly-born and the first ever multilateral agreement on trade in services. Despite of potential development and welfare prospects abound in the services sector, only moderate liberalization has been achieved under the GATS and...

The creation of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), in the Uruguay Round, and its entry into force in 1995 marked a new stage in the history of the multilateral system. It was motivated essentially by the rapid expansion of international services trade within an increasingly open...

Conventional wisdom has it that, in recent years, the legalized mechanism of dispute settlement before the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been “busier than ever”, “a victim of its own success”. This paper uses count data to assess the WTO’s current caseload and examines how it has...