Law Commons^™

China’S Changing Perspective On The Wto: From Aspiration, Assimilation To Alienation, Henry S. Gao

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Since its accession to the WTO twenty years ago, China’s image has shifted from a good student aspiring to assimilate itself into the multilateral trading system to one that is increasingly alienated from key WTO principles. How has China’s perspective on WTO been evolving? What are the reasons behind China’s changing perspective? This chapter addresses these questions from the Chinese perspective with a comprehensive analysis of the key moments in China’s first two decades in the WTO, followed by practical suggestions on how to engage China more constructively in the WTO and beyond.

Two Decades Of Trips In China, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter reviews China’s engagement with the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) in the past twenty years. It begins by highlighting TRIPS-related developments in the first decade of China’s WTO membership. The chapter then discusses the country’s ‘innovative turn’ in the mid-2000s and the ramifications of its changing policy positions. This chapter continues to examine the US-China trade war, in particular the second TRIPS complaint that the United States filed against China in March 2018. It concludes with observations about the impact of the TRIPS Agreement on China, China’s impact on that agreement and how the …

Us Trade Policy, China And The Wto (Foreword), Paolo Davide Farah

Book Chapters

In ‘U.S. Trade Policy, China and the WTO’, Nerina Boschiero addresses a key topic in contemporary international economic law and global governance. By focusing on a turning point in global politics and the shaping/framing of trade policy in the U.S.– the election of President Donald Trump sheds light on the tumultuous process of reshaping of global governance. The crisis of multilateralism has been discussed at length in academia and mainstream media. However, little attention has been paid to how the U.S. is reacting to the rise of China in the global order, in practical terms. In particular, focus …

Intellectual Property And The Politics Of Public Good In Covid-19: Framing Law, Institutions, And Ideas During Trips Waiver Negotiations At The Wto, Sara E. Fischer, Lucia Vitale, Akinyi Lisa Agutu, Matthew M. Kavanagh

O'Neill Institute Papers

Context: To facilitate the manufacturing of COVID-19 medical products, in October 2020, India and South Africa proposed a waiver of certain WTO intellectual property (IP) provisions. After 18 months, a narrow agreement that did little for vaccine access passed the ministerial, despite the pandemic’s impact on global trade, which the WTO is mandated to safeguard.

Methods: The authors conducted a content analysis of WTO legal texts, key actor statements, media reporting, and the WTO’s procedural framework to explore legal, institutional, and ideational explanations for the delay.

Findings: IP waivers are neither legally complex nor unprecedented within WTO …

Privacy Peg, Trade Hole: Why We (Still) Shouldn’T Put Data Privacy In Trade Law, Margot E. Kaminski, Kristina Irion, Svetlana Yakovleva

Publications

No abstract provided.

Public Ownership And The Wto In A Post Covid-19 Era: From Trade Disputes To A 'Social' Function, Paolo Davide Farah, Davide Zoppolato

Articles

Public ownership is closely bound to the need of the government to protect and guarantee the well-being of its citizens. Where the market cannot, or does not want to, provide goods and services, the State uses different tools to intervene, influence, and control some aspects of the private sphere of expression of its citizens in the name and interest of the collectivity. Although, in the past century, this behavior was accepted as one of the expressions of the public authority and part of the social contract, this perception has shifted partially in accordance with the wave of privatization programs initiated …

What Role For The Wto In Disciplining China’S State-Dominated Economy?, Jennifer A. Hillman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Is the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its rules-based system capable of addressing the distortions in trade caused by the explosive growth of China’s State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs)? If it is, why hasn’t it been put to use? If the WTO rules are not up to task, where and how do they need to be changed? Those are the questions that Henry Gao and Weihuan Zhou answer in their thorough and compelling assessment of the current state of China’s SOEs, the commitments China made when it joined the WTO and the relevance of the applicable WTO rules, Between Market Economy and …

China’S Changing Perspective On The Wto: From Aspiration, Assimilation To Alienation, Henry S. Gao

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Since its accession to the WTO twenty years ago, China's image has shifted from a good student aspiring to assimilate itself into the multilateral trading system to one that is increasingly alienated from key WTO principles. How has China's perspective on WTO been evolving? What are the reasons behind China's changing perspective? This paper answers these questions from the Chinese perspective with a comprehensive analysis of the key moments in China's first two decades in the WTO, followed by practical suggestions on how to engage China more constructively in the WTO and beyond.

Access To Medicines And Pharmaceutical Patents: Fulfilling The Promise Of Trips Article 31bis, Ezinne Miriam Igbokwe, Andrea Tosato

All Faculty Scholarship

The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) is one of the cornerstones of the World Trade Organization (WTO). TRIPS requires all WTO member countries (Members) to adopt minimum standards for the protection of intellectual property (IP). This international treaty is highly controversial. Its critics claim that TRIPS imposes a wealth transfer from poorer Members (net IP importers) to richer ones (net IP exporters). Its supporters maintain that trade between developing and developed economies cannot thrive without an internationally-harmonized IP framework. The most contentious issue has long been the impact of the TRIPS patents regime on access to medicines. …

Promising Trail Or Perilous Trap? Engaging China In The Wto And Beyond, Henry S. Gao

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

How to deal with China? This is the biggest question confronting U.S. trade policy - or even the United States' entire foreign policy - today. Over the past few years, the debate on this important issue has benefited from the contributions of many trade law scholars, including those by Mark Wu, Jennifer Hillman, Petros Mavroidis, André Sapir, Rob Howse, Weihuan Zhou, and the present author. In Governing the Interface of U.S.-China Trade Relations, Gregory Shaffer offers refreshing insights. Building on the framework developed by the U.S.-China Trade Policy Working Group, of which he is a member, Shaffer further adjusts the …

Confronting Intellectual Property Nationalism, Cynthia M. Ho

Faculty Publications & Other Works

Stories about nations engaging in vaccine (and medical) nationalism by hoarding limited COVID-19 vaccines and treatments are widespread, but there is a hidden phenomenon that has exacerbated vaccine nationalism and prolonged the pandemic: intellectual property nationalism or “IP nationalism.” This Article coins and explains this term and highlights its negative impacts. Essentially, some nations, primarily of the Global North, are hoarding essential knowledge protected by intellectual property (IP). This Article argues that IP nationalism has contributed to millions of unnecessary deaths and limited the growth of the global economy. Meanwhile, countries and pharmaceutical companies obscure the role of IP nationalism …

Introduction To The Symposium On Gregory Shaffer, "Governing The Interface Of U.S.-China Trade Relations", Harlan G. Cohen

Scholarly Works

What happens to international institutions when expectations about their function and purpose shift? Must such institutions give way as states reconsider the settlements on which those institutions are based, or can they adapt (or be adapted) to new geopolitical realities? Or to put it most bluntly, as the geopolitical balance of power shifts, must law give way to power? At a very deep level, these are the questions animating Gregory Shaffer's "Governing the Interface of U.S.-China Trade Relations," published in the American Journal ofInternationalfaw. 1 As the ballooning rivalry between the United States and China stretches and strains institutions like …

China’S Entry Into The Wto—A Mistake By The United States?, Jennifer A. Hillman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The conclusion that China's accession to the WTO was a failure from a U.S. perspective stems from: 1) loading too many issues and expectations—including an entire panoply of national security and geostrategic concerns -- on to the WTO and its rules-based, binding dispute settlement system to address; 2) failure by the United States and the rest of the world to use the tools available as a result of China’s accession to the WTO to both protect their domestic markets and hold China to account for its WTO commitments; and 3) China’s U-turn away from market-economy reforms to a much more …

Designing An Equitable Border Carbon Adjustment Mechanism, Ivan Ozai

Articles & Book Chapters

Policy makers worldwide have increasingly considered the adoption of a carbon adjustment at the border to equalize carbon pricing on foreign goods with carbon policies imposed on domestic production. The implementation of a border carbon adjustment (BCA) in the European Union has been recently proposed by the European Commission, followed by similar plans in the United States and Canada, as an instrument designed to address concerns about competitiveness and emissions leakage resulting from the absence of a global price on carbon or an internationally coordinated carbon-pricing system. Despite its potential to address these issues, the implementation of a BCA raises …

Wto Reform And China: Defining Or Defiling The Multilateral Trading System?, Henry S. Gao

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In November 2001, China finally acceded to the World Trade Organization, in a deal described by then WTO Director-General Mike Moore as a “defining moment in the history of the multilateral trading system”. In recent years, however, China has been accused of defiling the letter and spirt of WTO rules with its unique economic model. Believing that existing WTO rules are inadequate in dealing with the China challenge, key WTO Members have launched a new round of WTO reform, which is the subject of this article. Contrary to popular belief, most of the problems concerning China are not new but …

Achieving Privacy: Costs Of Compliance And Enforcement Of Data Protection Regulation, Anupam Chander, Meaza Abraham, Sandeep Chandy, Yuan Fang, Dayoung Park, Isabel Yu

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Is privacy a luxury for the rich world? Remarkably, there is a dearth of literature evaluating whether data privacy is too costly for companies to implement, or too expensive for governments to enforce. This paper is the first to offer a review of surveys of costs of compliance, and to summarize national budgets for enforcement. The study shows that while privacy may indeed prove costly for companies to implement, it is not too costly for governments to enforce. This study will help inform governments as they fashion and implement privacy laws to address the “privacy enforcement gap”—the disparity between the …

Testing For Consistency: Certain Digital Tax Measures And Wto Non-Discrimination, Okanga Ogbu Okanga

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Few issues have challenged tax policymakers and commentators as much as digital taxation has in recent years. Ongoing efforts to reconstruct the rules of international tax to “properly” govern the taxation of the global digital economy have evoked some important tax and trade related considerations. As regards the latter, unilateral attempts by various states – partly spurred on by a lack of multilateral consensus – to tax nonresident digitalized businesses threaten to disrupt international trade relations, with threats of trade war exchanged between some World Trade Organization (WTO) member states over the propriety of the proposed tax measures. As the …

Integrating Environmental Protection Into Asean Trading System, Kittinut Supsoontornkul

Dissertations & Theses

Integrating environmental protection into ASEAN trading system is pivotal for ensuring long-term economic development and environmental sustainability. Due to its resource-based economy, ASEAN's economic performance highly depends on the sustainable condition of the environment. The ASEAN approach prioritizing economic growth without environmental consideration leads to environmental degradation and economic loss. Many transboundary environmental problems in ASEAN result from unsustainable production methods aiming to maximize advantages in trade competition. There are growing international efforts in addressing production and process methods as a part of the sustainable development goal. Major trading partners of ASEAN increasingly employ unilateral environmental trade measures and environmental …

Leveling The Playing Field: Industrial Policy And Export-Contingent Subsidies In India-Export Related Measures, Timothy Meyer, Swati Dhingra

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In India–Export Related Measures, the United States challenged a range of Indian measures as prohibited export-contingent subsidies, and a WTO panel largely agreed. This article examines the factors at play in the United States’ decision to bring the challenge. At the level of policy, the United States case reflects India’s graduation from the protections afforded developing nations’ export-contingent subsidies under the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures. A closer examination, however, shows that India ramped up its export-contingent subsidies just as the SCM Agreement required it to wind those subsidies down. Moreover, the expanded Indian subsidies led to increased import …

Informing Wto Reform: Dispute Settlement Performance, 1995-2020, Bernard M. Hoekman, Petros C. Mavroidis, Maarja Saluste

Faculty Scholarship

This article presents salient facts on the performance of WTO dispute settlement, using an updated dataset on cases adjudicated between 1992 and mid 2020. The dataset provides a comprehensive compilation of information on WTO disputes, including complainants, respondents and third parties; the substantive matters tabled; the WTO provisions invoked; the claims that are accepted or rejected by adjudicating bodies; the time involved to complete the consultation, panel and appeal (Appellate Body) stages; and the identity of panelists and how they were appointed. We highlight elements of the operation of the system that are salient to WTO reform discussions, while drawing …

Plurilateral Cooperation As An Alternative To Trade Agreements: Innovating One Domain At A Time, Bernard M. Hoekman, Charles F. Sabel

Faculty Scholarship

At the end of 2017 different groups of WTO members decided to launch talks on four subjects, setting aside the WTO consensus working practice. This paper argues that these ‘joint statement initiatives’ (JSIs) should seek to establish open plurilateral agreements (OPAs) even in instances where the outcome can be incorporated into existing schedules of commitments of participating WTO members. Designing agreements as OPAs provides an institutional framework for collaboration among the responsible national authorities, transparency, mutual review and learning, as well as alternatives to default WTO dispute settlement procedures which may not be appropriate for supporting cooperation on the matters …

Dispute Settlement Under The African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement: A Preliminary Assessment, Olabisi D. Akinkugbe

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement (AfCFTA) will add a new dispute settlement system to the plethora of judicial mechanisms designed to resolve trade disputes in Africa. Against the discontent of Member States and limited impact the existing highly legalized trade dispute settlement mechanisms have had on regional economic integration in Africa, this paper undertakes a preliminary assessment of the AfCFTA Dispute Settlement Mechanism (DSM). In particular, the paper situates the AfCFTA-DSM in the overall discontent and unsupportive practices of African States with highly legalized dispute settlement systems and similar WTO-Styled DSMs among other shortcomings. Notwithstanding the transplantation of …

Trading Through A Pandemic: The Singaporean Experience, Henry Gao, Dhiraj G. Chainani, Siu Farn Chew

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Being a small country with one of the highest trade-to-GDP ratios in the world, Singapore faced seemingly insurmountable challenges at the onset of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. As countries around the world scrambled to fight the pandemic, they imposed restrictions on exports and imports, suspended international transportation of both goods and people, and invoked emergency power and exceptions to justify their actions. All these presented unprecedented challenges to Singapore, a country which relies on international trade not only for its prosperity but also for survival. This article discusses how Singapore tries to meet these challenges through various initiatives …

Artificial Intelligence And Global Trade Governance: A Pluralist Agenda, Han-Wei Liu, Ching-Fu Lin

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This Article is the first of its kind to map out imminent challenges facing the World Trade Organization (WTO) against the emergence of artificial intelligence. It does so by examining critically AI’s normative implications for four issue areas—robot lawyers, automated driving systems, computer-generated works, and automated decision-making processes. By unpacking the diverse governance approaches taken in addressing these issues, this Article highlights the underlying economic, societal, cultural, and political interests in different jurisdictions and identifies the growing normative relevance of global legal pluralism. In light of the changing fabric of international law, this Article seeks to reconceptualize AI and global …

Wto Reform: Multilateral Control Over Unilateral Retaliation - Lessons From The Us-China Trade War, Julia Ya Qin

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Taming America's Sugar Rush: A Traffic-Light Label Approach, Alexia Brunet Marks

Publications

Excess added sugar negatively impacts health and can lead to a litany of problems, such as diet-related chronic diseases, e.g., diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and obesity, costing Americans millions in rising medical bills each year. Even more, new studies reveal that individuals with these underlying chronic diseases are at a higher risk of complications from COVID-19 and other viruses compared to those who are deemed healthy. And yet added sugars are difficult to avoid because unlike naturally occurring sugars found in fruits, vegetables, and milk, these sweeteners are added during food processing and preparation.

The problem is that while consumers …

Dispute Settlement Under The African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement: A Preliminary Assessment, Olabisi D. Akinkugbe

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement (AfCFTA) will add a new dispute settlement system to the plethora of judicial mechanisms designed to resolve trade disputes in Africa. Against the discontent of Member States and limited impact the existing highly legalized trade dispute settlement mechanisms have had on regional economic integration in Africa, this paper undertakes a preliminary assessment of the AfCFTA Dispute Settlement Mechanism (DSM). In particular, the paper situates the AfCFTA-DSM in the overall discontent and unsupportive practices of African States with highly legalized dispute settlement systems and similar WTO-Styled DSMs among other shortcomings. Notwithstanding the transplantation of …

Are Data Privacy Laws Trade Barriers?, Margot Kaminski

Publications

No abstract provided.

Making Sense Of The Arbitrator’S Ruling In Ds 316 Ec And Certain Member States – Measures Affecting Trade In Large Civil Aircraft (Article 22.6-Ec): A Jigsaw Puzzle With (At Least) A Couple Missing Pieces, Petros C. Mavroidis, Kamal Saggi

Faculty Scholarship

“The U.S. won a $7.5 Billion award from the World Trade Organization against the European Union, who has for many years treated the USA very badly on Trade due to Tariffs, Trade Barriers, and more. This case going on for years, a nice victory”, tweeted President Trump’s on October 3, 2019. The United States (US) won not only the highest amount of retaliation ever adjudicated in the history of the WTO but also an ongoing right to retaliate on an annual basis until such time as the EU had complied by either removing the subsidies it granted Airbus or somehow …

Insulating A Wto Investment Facilitation Framework From Isds, George A. Bermann, N. Jansen Calamita, Manjiao Chi, Karl P. Sauvant

Faculty Scholarship

The authors identify several ways in which a WTO investment facilitation framework for development can be insulated from investor-state dispute settlement provisions in international investment agreements, and suggest specific formulations in this respect.