The five contributions in this legal working paper discuss various aspects of investment arbitration. They were originally presented at the ECB legal colloquium on ‘The new challenges raised by investment arbitration for the EU legal order’ which took place in Frankfurt am Main in 2019.

Can states avoid lengthy and costly investor-state arbitration proceedings by entering into amicable settlements? While this is always possible in principle, data suggests that states struggle to do so. This Perspective discusses possible structural reforms for states to enable (and encourage)...

This paper investigates the effect of arbitral proceedings on bilateral portfolio equity investments in emerging markets. Investment disputes may deter foreign investors as they reveal a government’s poor behavior towards foreign investors. The analysis investigates the effects of the first...

In 2019 and the early months of 2020, global trade faced two major albeit very different shocks, namely the United States-China trade war and the cascading response of the countries around the world to the COVID-19 pandemic. While the former situation involved a pair of centrally-placed trading...

Rules-based trade is under attack and the WTO is at risk of marginalization. The COVID-19 pan-demic and its detrimental effects on public health, global supply- and value chains and industrial production, have brought back national export restrictions and stopped the free flow of goods and...