Special and Differential Treatment for Developing Countries (SDT) constitutes a central feature of the GATT/WTO system. Its formal goal is to foster export-led growth in developing countries. Its theoretical foundations and empirical support are, however, weak at best. In particular, SDT...

The investment choices of large asset owners such as pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and endowments, are, to a large extent ‘guided’ and pre-determined by the systematic use of old- fashioned indices or benchmarks designed by a small set of Anglo- American ‘index providers’ –...

This study investigated the current situation of the Philippine economy concerning Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs). Barriers to foreign direct investment (FDI) in the Philippines are highly restrictive. The Foreign Investment Act (R.A. 7042, 1991, amended by R.A. 8179, 1996) states that at...

Public pension funds are, by far, the world's preeminent asset owners, with more than $ 25 trillions in combined assets. The largest pension funds are found in the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, the Netherlands and the UK ("pension superpowers"). How they are managed, their funding...

Owing to innovations and a growing consumer demand for better and safer products, the number of technical standards has been steadily increasing in recent years. As standardization is a major catalyst to global commerce, The World Trade Organization (WTO), a typical consensus-driven...

For decades the prevailing view in the United States and many Western countries has been that China does not appropriately respect intellectual property rights. These beliefs lie at the heart of President Donald Trump's current trade war with China. Despite substantial geopolitical debate over...

The Concept Paper discusses ways to reinvigorate the WTO as a forum for trade negotiation and trade-related rule-making, dealing with both negotiation and decision-making procedures and possible subject matters. Although it makes several proposals to overcome the current impase of the WTO as a...

Portuguese Abstract: O caráter cada vez mais complexo da trama digital e o crescente número de conflitos nessa seara desafiam nossa capacidade de compreensão. Os autores propõem uma taxonomia dos modos de comércio digital, analisam as áreas em que existem conflitos e comparam as táticas...

This paper sets up a model of trade, in which two countries with differing levels of technology specialize in the production of sub-stages of the global value chain. In the open economy, the technologically backward country exports intermediates in exchange for imports of a homogeneous...

As tensions between China and the US have grown, so too have China’s economic and political difficulties with a number of other countries, particularly those in the Five Eyes intelligence sharing relationship (to the exclusion perhaps of New Zealand). Relations between the European Union and...