This paper examines the impact of trade-related technology diffusion from G7 countries to Latin America and East Asia on total factor productivity controlling for education, governance, and distance. We build on the trade and distance-focused strands of the technology diffusion literature and find that (i) total factor productivity (TFP) increases with education, trade, and governance (ETG) and declines with distance to the G7 countries; (ii) increasing Latin America's ETG to East Asia's level would double TFP, accounting for about 75% of the TFP gap between the two country groups; and (iii) South America's greater remoteness relative to Mexico's from the US and Canada significantly reduces its TFP and similarly for Singapore's greater remoteness from Japan relative to Hong Kong.

Brazil has changed its negotiation strategy in World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations. In the first half of the WTO era (1995–), Brazil adopted a strong developing country leadership role as coordinator and spokesperson of the G20 group of developing countries. More recently, however, this group has disappeared from the negotiation scene. This article examines how Brazil has departed from a 2000 status quo and arrived at a more flexible approach, less reliant on the industrialized-developing divide as a structuring principle of its diplomacy. Using WTO negotiation documents, trade delegate interviews, dispute settlement case law, and secondary literature, I outline the contours of new directions in Brazilian trade policy. These include joint legislative initiatives with the EU, a move towards the plurilateral level on non-traditional issues, a greater heterogeneity of dispute settlement targets, and a newly flexible handling of its rights under the WTO's special and differential treatment status. The article contributes to ongoing debates on Brazil's status in international affairs, its reliance on large coalitions, and the maintenance of followership as key directives of its foreign policy, and scholarship that sees Brazil as stuck in a ‘graduation dilemma’.

Under the Liberal International Order (LIO) of the post-WWII years, foreign investment protection was meant to be granted by international law and institutions. But current economic de-globalization is giving way to institutional and legal de-globalization. Domestic laws relating to foreign investment, especially in the form of Domestic Investment Laws, are taking over International Investment Agreements as the standard means of regulating cross-border trade and investment flows. The article compares substantive and procedural standards of investor protection in international and domestic investment law, as well as old and new Domestic Investment Laws, with a focus on non-discrimination and dispute settlement. The move to domestic law in IEL does not always signify a trend for most states to isolate themselves from the international economy. Rather, it is often an effort to achieve similar ends as those of the LIO but using different means. The article discusses an alternative political economy framework for an international (economic) law of ends, the cornerstone of which is the right to hospitality.

Competition policy is one important aspect of trade liberalization. However, when examining preferential trade agreements (PTAs), a major type of policy tools to liberalize trade, competition provisions are revealed not to be uniformly distributed across these treaties. What explains the variation in the design of competition clauses in PTAs? Borrowing insights from the rational design of international institutions and combining them with those from treaty ratification and policy diffusion literatures, I identify five major causal mechanisms through which competition provisions are incorporated into PTAs. In evaluating them, I employ a range of operationalization techniques to capture the proposed mechanisms. A treaty-level analysis of 319 PTAs over the period 1960–2015 lends strong and robust support to most of the hypothesized relationships. By integrating theoretical frameworks across international political economy literatures with that from law and economics scholarship, this study demonstrates the utility of political science thinking to the real-world international law-making.

‘Development’ is a legal concept which has been central to the practice of international economic law (IEL). This Article examines how ‘development’ continues to be at the heart of struggles between domestic investment laws (DILs) and international economic law. By examining over 3000 international investment agreements (IIAs) and DILs signed in the last seven decades, this Article identifies the ways in which the concept of development has evolved in tandem with the growth of international economic law by dividing the history of international investment law into six main phases. It traces the emergence of ‘development’ in DIL to the decolonization era arguing that post 1990, the proliferation of international investment treaties and growth of investment treaty arbitration have been used as tools of liberalization on the weak premise that this would lead to economic development. In this context, this Article examines closely the interpretation of ‘investment’ by ICSID tribunals, promotion of international arbitration for economic development, attempts to internationalize economic development contracts, continued relevance of the New International Economic Order, and shift to sustainable development in IEL discourse.

The Knowledge-for-Development (K4D) approach has been characterized by a marked concentration of the production of research on development in developed countries. The underlying utilitarian approach to social science research misrepresents the nature and making of policy, raises entry barriers for developing country researchers, and focuses on the production of research to the detriment of its use. Using such research in developing countries requires informed debate, consideration of the local environment, and sufficient local research capacity. Foreign assistance should focus on research capacity building as a specific objective, distinct from the production and publication of research, with its own management, implementation, and monitoring. This is essential if the objective of the K4D approach, namely the better use of scientific knowledge to enhance the quality of policies, is to be achieved.

The 1980s and 1990s saw a policy revolution in developing countries in which many highly protected (if not closed) economies were opened to world trade. These reforms were largely undertaken unilaterally, but international economic institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organization supported these efforts. This paper examines the ways in which these institutions promoted, or failed to promote, trade policy reform during this pivotal period.

State capitalism and the liberal economic order have had an antagonistic relationship. While the international economic law rules have sought to reduce the role of the state in the economy, state-controlled entities have more recently increased in size and importance – both domestically, as well as internationally. In this connection, the article analyses the effects of state capitalism's expansion simultaneously with the domestic investment law of States. The article analyses the underlying principles of state capitalism in an effort to answer the question of whether domestic laws promoting investment – as defined in the special issue – are positive, negative, or neutral to state capitalists. The article further interprets the trends spawned by the propagation of the liberal international economic order as states realize their development targets and envisage to actively contribute to the regulation of international trade and cross-border transactions globally.

This paper examines the legal ramifications of using tariff flexibility arising from GATT unbound tariff lines or tariff overhangs under both WTO and preferential trade agreement (PTA) law when flexibility is exercised preferentially for PTA partners. Under WTO law, a WTO member that is a party to a PTA under GATT Article XXIV is required to use tariff flexibility on a non-discriminatory basis. However, PTA obligations including tariff elimination commitments and a standstill clause prohibit the WTO member from raising applied tariffs on imports from the PTA parties, thereby preventing the use of tariff flexibility on a non-discriminatory manner. In contrast, a WTO member entering into a PTA under the Enabling Clause may use tariff flexibility discriminatorily without violating WTO law. A WTO member has greater legal latitude in utilizing tariff flexibility if it forms a PTA under the Enabling Clause rather than under GATT Article XXIV. The discriminatory exercise of tariff flexibility by some WTO members in conformity with PTA obligations, but in violation of WTO law, is further evidence of the fragmentation of the world trading system, where WTO law is facing its limits.

Over the past three decades, tariff protection to farmers has fallen and partly been replaced by domestic support, whilst support for farmers in some emerging economies has grown. Against that backdrop, this paper provides new estimates of national economic impacts of global agricultural tariffs and domestic supports. Using the latest global economy-wide GTAP (Global Trade Analysis Project) model calibrated to 2017, we simulate (a) the removal of food and agricultural domestic supports and agri-food tariffs and (b) the removal also of tariffs on imports of non-agricultural goods. We find that agricultural support policies are still an important part of the global welfare cost of all goods’ trade-restrictive policies (albeit only half as costly as in 2001), and tariffs still dominate the global welfare cost of all farm-support programs. That farm support could be re-instrumented to relieve natural resource and environmental stresses, boost food and nutrition security, and alleviate poverty and income inequality.

To preserve the functioning of WTO dispute settlement following the blockage of the Appellate Body, a sub-set of WTO Members created the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement (MPIA). In the wake of the first appeal award rendered under the MPIA, this contribution describes how the MPIA process works and lists some of the innovations that can be found in the first MPIA procedure. More innovations can be expected as arbitration under Article 25 of the Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU) (be it ad hoc or under the MPIA) can be adjusted and molded case-by-case by the disputing parties in their appeal arbitration agreements. In this sense, the MPIA can serve not only as an interim stop-gap to preserve WTO dispute settlement. It can also function as a laboratory to explore and test new ways of making WTO dispute settlement more efficient and in line with WTO Members' goals and interests: experimental reform by doing, rather than one-off, formal DSU review.

Can supranational actors influence domestic policy? In this article, we study how international organizations have sought to shape the contents of domestic laws aimed at protecting foreign investment. Traditionally, the influence of international organizations on public policy has been assumed to run through loan conditionalities. We build on a recent strand of literature indicating that international organizations can also influence public policy through technical assistance. Empirically, we present a cross-sectional mapping of the protection that states offer foreign investors in domestic investment laws, and a mapping of the advisory activities of the three main organizations offering technical assistance on foreign investment laws: the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the World Bank. We find that there are significant variations in protection offered under domestic investment laws, and variation in international organizations’ technical assistance over time and across organizations. To explore technical assistance as a causal mechanism for influence on public policy more closely in this field, we conduct a case study of the development of domestic investment legislation in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Border Carbon Adjustments (BCAs) may play an important role in lowering the economic costs of greenhouse gas mitigation and in overcoming political-economy constraints on the use of carbon taxes or equivalent measures. A carbon tax plus a full BCA could deal with the competitiveness challenges arising from carbon taxes by using the WTO's National Treatment principle to apply equal levies on domestic production and on imports, and by symmetrically rebating the carbon tax on exports in the manner of a value-added tax (VAT) export rebate. This approach would shift the base for carbon taxation from production to demand and potentially achieve substantial reductions in the cost of cutting emissions. It would avoid the massive measurement and compliance problems associated with BCAs based on foreign emission intensities. By contrast, import-only BCAs distort prices of importables relative to exportables; create divisive trade conflicts and deterioration in the terms of trade for developing countries; and likely require development of complex sets of import preferences.

The article analyses investment rulemaking in new Asian regionalism in the context of evolving national legislation and regional trade strategies. It argues that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) represent Asia's pragmatic incrementalism in reforming the investment regime. The process reinforces the relationship between international economic law and domestic investment laws. In tandem with transforming international investment agreements, ASEAN expedited investment and services trade, and established the modern investor–state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism. The RCEP further buttresses the ASEAN centrality in regional frameworks by consolidating ASEAN Plus One agreements. Yet, the RCEP's omission of ISDS reflects a distinct approach that may confront challenges to state-to-state proceedings and treaty shopping under overlapping pacts. Finally, the research sheds light on Asian countries' recent investment agreements and domestic dispute settlement that complement the liberal international order. These developments provide valuable models for developing countries and contribute to the understanding of global investment reforms from an Asian perspective.