In the past decade, the European Union and the United States have pushed aggressively for the development of bilateral and regional trade agreements. What are the strengths and weaknesses of these agreements? Are China's bilateral and regional trade agreements different from these agreements?...

On 1 January 2005, a controversial trade agreement entered into force between Australia and the United States. Though heralded by the parties as facilitating the removal of barriers to free trade (in ways not achievable in multilateral fora), it also contained many trade-restricting intellectual...

Trade agreement negotiations are routinely cloaked in secrecy, a model that may have suited the Eighteenth Century, but has no place in modern democracies. Transparency deficits have led to capture by powerful industries, sometimes to the detriment of public health. This is a standard account of...

For most of the twentieth century, international courts and tribunals rarely enjoyed blanket jurisdiction over foreign nationals. This has changed with the advent of ‘investment treaty arbitrations.’ Investment treaty arbitration is a treaty-based regime that uses rules and structures of...

Confronting two formidable crises, one internal (the Doha debacle) and the other external (the global financial crisis), this Article explores the fundamental question: has the WTO become irrelevant or even passé? After sketching a recidivistic pattern of collapses and resumptions, the Article...

This paper argues that there are significant potential economic gains to be obtained from an EU-Canada Free Trade Agreement. The evolution of trade between the US and Canada following the signing of CUSFTA in 1989 offers a good illustration of how trade might increase after an EU-Canada FTA, as...

Why are some trade agreements concluded for a limited period of time while others have the form of evergreen contracts supplemented with an advance termination notice clause? We use a dynamic incomplete contracting model to demonstrate that the time structure of the trade agreement is related to...

Since the early 2000s, the European Union and the United States have pushed aggressively for the development of bilateral, plurilateral and regional trade agreements. Termed economic partnership agreements (EPAs) and free trade agreements (FTAs) by the European Union and FTAs by the United...

In this paper, we explore the role of trade in the evolution of labor share in Latin American countries. We use trade agreements with large economies (the United States, the European Union, and China) to capture the effect of sharp changes in trade. In the last two decades, labor share has...

Rules of origin are critical components of preferential trade agreements designed to stop products coming in under insufficient transformation or through the partner that applies the lowest tariff. But in practice, these rules are often needlessly complex, undoing the benefits of market access...