By prohibiting subsidies that support illegal, unregulated or unreported fishing activities and contribute to unsustainable depletion of marine resources, the 2022 Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies (AFS) is the first WTO treaty to recognize that a specific trade policy instrument can have adverse...

The WTO dispute settlement system is in crisis, endangering the future of the organization. The proximate reason for alarm is the dwindling number of Appellate Body (AB) members, the result of the United States blocking new appointments as the terms of sitting members expire. The AB crisis...

In December 2019 the WTO Appellate Body (AB) will cease to operate unless the United States stops blocking new appointments. The US argues the AB has exceeded its mandate and has indicated it wants to ensure that the AB performs the role originally assigned to it in 1995. This paper discusses...

Recent survey evidence and proposals made in long-running negotiations to improve WTO dispute settlement procedures illustrate that many stakeholders believe the system needs improvement. The Appellate Body crisis could have been avoided but for the use of consensus as WTO working practice....

Recent debates on the operation of the WTO’s dispute resolution mechanism have focused primarily on the Appellate Body (AB). We argue that this neglects the first-order issue confronting the rules-based trading system: sustaining the principle of de-politicized conflict resolution that is...

This paper considers the APEC and proposed EGA agreements which grant tariff concession in favor of "green" goods. We find that the practical significance of the APEC agreement should not be overestimated as it involves modest tariff concessions over a subset of goods which are not heavily...

Services are regulated for a variety of reasons. Regulation is typically influenced by political economy forces and may thus at times reflect protectionist motivations. Similar considerations arise for goods, but the potential for protectionist capture may be greater in services as many sectors...

Regulation of football in Europe is, absent some piecemeal interventions (like sharing of TV rights) largely non-existent. This is the case, because the de facto regulator (UEFA, Union Européenne of Football Associations) has no mandate to comprehensively address on its own competitive balance,...

Global trade and investment is increasingly characterized by systemic conflicts, giving rise to unilateral policies to attain competitiveness, national security and other noneconomic objectives. Disparate national measures motivated by all these objectives targeting the global value chains...

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...