The rapid rise in global fragmentation - foreign investment, global supply chains, and 'production sharing' - is fundamentally reshaping the multilateral trading system. This paper uses a simple economic modeling framework to understand how the global fragmentation phenomenon may reshape the...

Many governments have expressed concerns about the uncertainty linked to the perceived inconsistency of treaty interpretation in Investor-State dispute settlement (ISDS). An OECD-hosted intergovernmental investment roundtable has been considering a range of tools through which governments can...

Is there something really new about "land grab" except its extent? What is wrong with an investment contract allowing the holder to buy a farm and to export wheat to Saudi Arabia, or soybeans and maize as cattle feed to Korea, or to plant and process sugar cane and palm oil into ethanol for...

As our societies face new challenges and make new demands from policies addressing international investment, there is a new urgency to profoundly reconsider treaties addressing investment. This paper was prepared originally as background for initial inter-governmental and public discussions at...

Investment treaty policy increasingly interacts with business responsibilities. This scoping paper first surveys the converging approaches to responsible business conduct (RBC) and business and human rights (BHR) as reflected in the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, the United...

In this paper, we study the impacts of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) between the EU countries and China on EU home investments. We consider BITs as "treatments" that provide further access to global value chains (GVCs). We identify the causal impacts of the BITs on the relationship...

The fair and equitable treatment (FET) provision has leapt to prominence in the last 15 years as the principal ground of liability at issue in many if not most investment treaty arbitration claims. In debates about the impact of investment treaties on the right to regulate, FET is second only to...

Investor-state dispute settlement provisions in modern trade agreements allow companies to bring suit against governments for policy changes that reduce the value of their investments, which include by definition expected profits. While these treaties also provide that the mere fact that a...

This paper reviews the relationship between international investment agreements (IIAs) and foreign direct investment (FDI). It is organised in two parts. The first part explores the generic structure of IIAs and highlights the components that are particularly relevant to FDI. It then gives an...