Law Commons^™

The Legal And Economic Principles Of World Trade Law: National Treatment, Gene M. Grossman, Henrik Horn, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

The primary objective of most trade agreements is to restrain members' use of trade policies for protectionist purposes. But it would be pointless to restrict the application of border instruments without regulating the possible use of domestic policies for protectionist purpose. To this end, most agreements include an obligation for National Treatment (NT) of foreign products. The NT provision in the GATT appears in Art. III, which applies to most government actions that have impact trade. It requires that imported products be treated as favorably by domestic policy as similar, indigenous products. This study offers suggestions based on legal and …

The Case For Auctioning Countermeasures In The Wto, Kyle Bagwell, Petros C. Mavroidis, Robert W. Staiger

Faculty Scholarship

A major accomplishment of the Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations in creating the World Trade Organization (WTO) was the introduction of new dispute settlement procedures. These procedures were intended to provide a significant step forward, relative to GATT, in the settling of trade disputes, in large part by ensuring that violations of WTO commitments would be met with swift retaliation ("suspension of concessions") by the affected trading partners. While the dispute settlement procedures of the WTO indeed represent a considerable improvement over those in GATT, nine years of experience under the new procedures suggests that significant problems of enforcement remain …

International Aspects Of Fundamental Tax Reconstructing: Practice Or Principle, Michael J. Graetz

Faculty Scholarship

The globalization of economic activity, including the expansion of international trade, the amazing ability of international capital markets to transfer capital rapidly across borders, and the movement in Europe toward greater economic unification, have made it more difficult for nations independently to fashion tax laws that properly balance their own equity, economic efficiency and simplicity goals. This is what makes this conference to analyze the international aspects of recent proposals to replace the federal income tax with some form of consumption tax, with particular emphasis on the Nunn-Domenici "USA" tax and the Armey-Shelby flat tax ("flat tax"), so important. As …

Challenges To The Doctrine Of Free Trade, Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Faculty Scholarship

The doctrine of free trade is facing new challenges today. As one surveys the policy arena, questions are raised about free trade by those who worry about Japan (and today this includes many more than the "revisionists") and who argue that free trade with Japan is not gainful. Several environmentalists as well oppose free trade with passion. These concerns relate to what now is called the absence of "level playing fields": "fair trade" as a precondition of free trade is the battle cry.

There is also the fear that free trade, even if efficient, hurts the unskilled and thus immiserizes …