The Second Biennial Global Conference of the Society of International Economic Law (SIEL) will be hosted by the University of Barcelona and its IELPO LL.M. Programme at the premises of the University of Barcelona from the 8th July to 10th July 2010.Over the course of the last two decades, the...

More than 170 years ago, Frédéric Bastiat noted in his masterly work Economic Sophisms that the “opposition to free trade rests upon errors, or, if you prefer, upon half-truths.”1 Ever since Adam Smith successfully replaced mercantilist orthodoxy with free trade doctrine in his celebrated...

Digital technology has penetrated various fields, including international trade. This study aims to analyze how barriers/openness to trade in digital services affected exports before the COVID-19 pandemic (2015-2016) and during the pandemic (2019-2020). Based on the Gravity model, exports seem...

Despite the major advances in information technology that have shaped the recent wave of globalization, openness to trade is still a political choice, and trade policy can change with shifts in domestic political equilibria. This paper suggests that a particular threat and a limiting factor to...

This Article, originally presented at a symposium, THE WTO AT A CROSSROADS, in 2004 at the Law Faculty of Bar Ilan University in Israel, provides a proposal that responds to the problems posed by the increasing prevalence of regional trade agreements. The Article argues that RTAs have tended to...

This paper measures and discusses recent developments of import volumes making appropriate comparisons against earlier historic episodes whenever relevant. The descriptive analysis covers the inter bellum, the major financial crises of the 1980s, the 1990s and early 2000, as well as the most...

The "fashion industry" can be named as one of the creative industries instituting the creative economy. In this quality, it features many important defining characteristics of the traditional sectors of the cultural industries, which formed the core of the dispute underlying the "culture and...

This chapter argues that the WTO Appellate Body has not been consistent in applying Article 31 of the VCLT and considering the context of the relevant treaty text in light of its object and purpose. It has instead either been overly mechanistic in its textual interpretation or has strayed from...

Whether international economic integration arrangements result in more liberal trade at the multilateral level cannot be proven with ease. Integration may start this process, but it may also reverse it. New mega-integration deals: the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Regional Comprehensive Economic...

The issue of sovereign debt - its character and effect - is really part of the much larger battle between two fundamentally opposed visions of the nature and character of the nation-states in general, and debtor states in particular, and of the global system that maintains the market for such...