How do countries settle disputes in the shadow of the law? Even in the presence of legalized dispute settlement, countries still rely on diplomatic channels to resolve conflicts. But it can be difficult to assess diplomacy's impact on dispute resolution, because those channels tend to be opaque....

The Trade Policy Review Mechanism (TPRM) received much scholarly attention when it was first established in 1989, but has been overshadowed of late by dispute settlement processes. This paper examines the relationship between barriers to trade that are flagged by the World Trade Organization's...

President Obama's major trade initiatives, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, and obtaining fast-track trade negotiating authority from Congress, have run into a buzz saw of opposition, which has derailed prospects for U.S. trade liberalization for...

This paper unpacks the role of the domestic content of imports as a novel source of policy interdependence along the global supply chain. We show how a rise in local contents embodied in imports can skew national trade policy preferences, and pull upstream and downstream countries in asymmetric...

This contribution provides a cost-benefit analysis in a partial equilibrium framework to investigate the welfare consequences of a prohibitive regulatory non-tariff measure (NTM) in the form of a sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measure aimed at a foreign product with perceived negative...

Regional trade agreements (RTAs) have become an indelible feature of the international trading landscape. Most, if not all, RTAs contain provisions that establish procedures for resolving disputes among their signatory members. Yet, the design and functioning of these dispute settlement...

The early stages of the GATT focused on MEs and did not include rules related to NMEs. With the creation of the WTO in 1995 and the participation of NMEs in a multilateral trading system, the WTO became interested in different treatments between MEs and NMEs. However, the ambiguity of the WTO...

International investment law is undergoing a time of reflection, review and revision. Increasing dissatisfaction with the functioning of the current system that governs the protection of international investment and the wish to ensure that investment is channelled towards sustainable development...