Foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows can lead to more opportunities for women in the job market but may also exacerbate gender disparities. While gender mainstreaming in trade agreements has been extensively discussed over the past few years, demonstrating the need for reform, the discussion on gender mainstreaming in investment treaties is incipient, although extremely interesting. The inclusion of gender provisions in investment treaties is one of the pillars for a successful strategy to overcome gender inequality. It needs to be addressed along with gender policies by multinational enterprises (MNEs) leading the foreign investment process. This chapter aims to address the role of women as levers of change and the opportunity for MNEs to be the drivers of this change. To this end, it reviews the recent evolution of gender provisions in investment agreements and demonstrates how FDI can foment much-needed change by providing examples of actions and policies by MNEs in the Americas towards promoting more opportunities for women.

What is the relationship between the global economy and international law? In this chapter, we examine instruments that reflect the liberalism that has prevailed in international trading relations for the last half-century.  The resulting instruments include the articles of the World Trade Organization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, and the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Agreement. We also highlight anti-corruption instruments and various non-governmental organizations that also share the goals and processes of international liberalism.   The middle section examines attempts to combat the various and increasingly sophisticated forms of corruption in international business transactions, especially the explosion of difficult-to-combat cyber fraud.  The latter part of the chapter notes a growing trend towards economic nationalist goals, and anti-competitive behavior among state and business elites.

Chapter 2 critiques various state-orientated theories – such as neorealism or neoliberal institutionalism – entrenched in the rationalist tradition. Our guiding premise in this book is to construct ASEAN’s identity qua organization using different insights from constructivism to probe ASEAN’s institutional evolution for the past several decades. Although ASEAN encompasses multiple economic and political dimensions, Chapter 2 focuses on the initial formation of ASEAN’s identity – in the 1987 ASEAN Agreement on the Promotion and Protection of Foreign Investment – as it concerns the intra-regional investment regime. To the extent that this investment regime is an important factor driving economic integration among the ASEAN states, scrutinizing ASEAN’s identity formation in this particular area offers a unique way of understanding ASEAN’s institutional development.