As the major players in globalization, firms often operate in states where human rights may not be respected. Without direct intent, firms may be complicit in human rights violations. In 2008, John Ruggie, the UN Special Representative on business and human rights, developed a framework for...

Corruption (the abuse of entrusted authority for illicit gain) is pervasive, hard to measure, and damaging both to economic growth and human rights. Corruption is also intimately associated with trade. However, the international organization governing trade, the WTO, says nothing about...

This paper studies the spread of the Black Death as a proxy for the flow of medieval trade between 1346 and 1351. The Black Death struck most areas of Europe and the wider Mediterranean. Based on a modified version of the gravity model, we estimate the speed (in kilometers per day) of...

With the WTO hamstrung and the Doha Round dead in all but name, the future directions of international trade and investment liberalisation will be largely determined by the policy strategies and initiatives of the world’s economic superpowers. Looking at the trade and investment policy...

There are countries that do not fall under the prevailing definitions of developed and developing country that are employed by the World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO fails to take into account the special circumstances and needs of these countries. While such special circumstances and needs...

There remains a broad conflict over the direction of future progress in international competition law. This conflict is exemplified by the very different tone and recommendation of expert commentators such as Judge Diane Wood and Eleanor Fox. This conflict is generally portrayed as a dichotomous...

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 will reflect on the burgeoning ‘trade and climate change’ scholarship in the context of previous linkage debates – particularly the trade and environment/human rights/development literature. It will focus on the extent to which unilateral measures adopted by States to fight...

Conventional economic wisdom predicts that free and competitive international trade should cause economies GDP to converge over the long run. Empirical evidence of sixteen developed countries suggests that the countries did converge in terms of labour productivity over the period of 1870 to...

This article posits that the creation and development of international regulatory regimes has so far required a choice between rulemaking and adjudication. Regulators that wish to make policy broadly and prospectively have done so informally and through rules. More elaborate and powerful...