After lengthy and tough negotiations, China became a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, which is widely considered as a landmark economic event in modern world history. The WTO accession marked a milestone of China’s economic opening and success in integration into the world economy. China’s trade opening, as well as global economic integration and multilateral trade rules, worked together to facilitate China gaining extraordinary economic and trade growth. In return, China has proved to become an indispensable engine for global economic growth, and its WTO membership has made the WTO a truly global and more relevant international organization. On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of China’s WTO membership, this chapter focuses on China’s performance in the multilateral trading system during the past 20 years, analyzing China’s overall implementation of WTO commitments and its contribution to the world economy and trade. More specifically, it takes the Initiative on Investment Facilitation as an example to analyze China’s leading role in spearheading recent “Joint Statement Initiatives” under the WTO framework. Furthermore, the chapter touches upon how China could assume its responsibility and commitment to the broader WTO reform.

Today almost every country in the world has an investment promotion agency (IPA) to attract and retain foreign investment. In principle, IPAs could be an important tool in advancing the sustainable development agenda, as they provide a country-led, domestically legitimate means of catalyzing new foreign investments. We argue that IPAs’ governance structures condition their potential contribution to sustainable development, by leading them to privilege certain ideas and interests over others. Specifically, IPAs that are more autonomous from the government bureaucracy tend to prioritise activities to increase overall inflows of foreign investment, while IPAs that are more integrated into the government bureaucracy are more likely to structure their activities in ways that prioritise their countries’ industrial policy goals. Evidence from World Bank surveys of IPA officials and a case study of Costa Rica’s IPA demonstrate how agencies’ governance structures incentivise them to approach their mandates in different ways, which in turn influences their contribution to sustainable, inclusive development. This research enriches our understanding of investment promotion as a tool for sustainable development and contributes to ongoing debates on how states manage economic globalisation.

International migration is a relative newcomer on the “trade and” agenda and has hitherto received relatively little attention in trade and migration studies alike. The inclusion of labour migration as one essential mode of cross-border trade in services, so-called Mode 4 in the GATS, opened the agenda for more far-reaching developments at the level of regional and bilateral free-trade agreements . This chapter shows that this deepening of the trade-migration nexus is intricately linked to power shifts in the global economy and the rise of regionalism. For the international trade regime in 2025, this means that, in combination with the ongoing power transitions, the trade-related mobility agenda is likely to expand beyond what the former sponsors of the GATS agreement, the European Union (EU) and the United States, originally intended.

The total share of foreign direct investment (FDI) flows to least developed countries (LDCs) remains very low and is often focused on resource extraction. Whereas most studies have focused on host countries’ measures to attract FDI, this chapter instead focuses on what the development partners of LDCs can do to promote and facilitate more quality and sustainable FDI to LDCs, either directly or indirectly. Direct support measures support outward FDI, such as financing programs and risk management instruments. Indirect support include support for improving the investment climate or the negotiation of international investment agreements. This chapter suggests certain avenues and likely scenarios that assist the customizations of home country measures (HCMs) to work for LDCs. For example, while it is laudable that home country governments support their firms to invest in LDCs, this may distort competition among foreign investors but also domestic firms in the similar sector. Support measures can also be designed conditional upon investor’s compliance with certain criteria of sustainable and responsible investment, such as technology transfer, climate protection, and respect for human rights.