Law Commons^™

International Investment Agreements: Impacts On Climate Change Policies In India, China And Beyond, Lise Johnson, Brooke Güven

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Mitigating and adapting to climate change will require a fundamental reorientation of our global economy as we move away from fossil fuels and transition to a low carbon and climate-resilient world. This reorientation depends on government actions to help catalyze and channel financial flows in new directions and away from business-as-usual practices.

International investment agreements (IIAs) – treaties that now number over 3,000 and have the objective of promoting and protecting cross-border investment flows_could potentially play a key role in these efforts to scale up and (re)direct investments to meet climate change mitigation and adaptation needs. As presently drafted and …

Space For Local Content Policies And Strategies, Lise Johnson

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

This paper explores both the role that local content measures can play in advancing sustainable development, and the impact that trade and investment treaties concluded over the past 20 years have had and will continue to have on the ability of governments to employ those tools. Certain local content measures had been restricted under the WTO due to wide agreement by negotiating parties that their costs outweigh their benefits. But the WTO also left a number of local content measures in governments’ policy toolboxes. As is discussed in this paper, however, that is changing, with the range of permissible actions …

Dispute Settlement In The Wto: Mind Over Matter, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

The basic point I advocate in this paper is that the WTO Dispute Settlement System aims to curb unilateralism. No sanctions can be imposed, unless if the arbitration process is through, the purpose of which is to ensure that reciprocal commitments entered should not be unilaterally undone through the commission of illegalities. There are good reasons though, to doubt whether practice guarantees full reciprocity. The insistence on calculating remedies prospectively, and not as of the date when an illegality has been committed, and the ensuing losses for everybody that could or could not be symmetric, lend support to the claim …

Mfn Clubs And Scheduling Additional Commitments In The Gatt: Learning From The Gats, Bernard Hoekman, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

Scheduling additional commitments for policies affecting trade in goods in the GATT has been plagued by two sources of ambiguity: the treatment of changes introduced unilaterally by members subsequent to an initial commitment, and the treatment of new commitments by WTO members pertaining to nontariff policy measures affecting trade in goods. This is not the case for trade in services, as the GATS makes explicit provision for additional commitments to be scheduled. Neither secondary law, in the form of decisions formally adopted by the WTO membership, nor case law has clarified the situation for trade in goods. This matter is …

Private Standards And The Wto: Reclusive No More, Petros C. Mavroidis, Robert Wolfe

Faculty Scholarship

Private standards are increasing in number, and they affect trade, but their status in the WTO remains problematic. Standards-takers are typically countries with little bargaining power, who cannot affect their terms of trade and thus, even if they possess domestic antitrust laws, will find it hard to persuade standard-setters to take account of their interests. Our concern is to bring more of these standards within the normative framework of the trade regime – that is, we worry that these private forms of social order can conflict with the fundamental norms of transparency and non-discrimination. The WTO membership has consumed itself …

The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight: The Not So Magnificent Seven Of The Wto Appellate Body, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

The WTO Appellate Body (AB) has produced a volume-wise important body of case law, which is often difficult to penetrate, never mind classify. Howse (2016) has attempted a very lucid taxonomy of the case law using the standard of review as benchmark for it. His conclusion is that the AB is quite cautious when facing nondiscriminatory measures, especially measures relating to the protection of human life and health, while it has adopted a more intrusive (into national sovereignty) standard when dealing with trade measures (like antidumping), which are by definition discriminatory as they concern imports only. In my response, I …