Can countries fulfill their obligations under international environmental agreements in the presence of international investment agreements or vice versa? This Perspective offers recommendations for arbitrators and countries to harmonize their climate goals and investment obligations by moving...

The bilateral investment court system the EU buttressed since 2015 risks losing momentum in the face of complex internal and external challenges. This Perspective weighs these challenges against the recent UNCITRAL decision to address ISDS reform, providing for a better framework to seek for...

The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership was concluded in November 2019. This Perspective explains that many commitments will be made in the texts, so the final agreement should be viewed as a framework rather than the last word on the topic. Like ASEAN+1 FTAs, RCEP will include a...

The EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment is China's first treaty with a section dedicated to sustainable development and labor regulations. It introduces major innovations such as ensuring corporate due diligence to end forced labor, among others. This significant development aims to...

This Perspective probes the complexities of umbrella clauses in international investment agreements, spotlighting their inherent legal ambiguities and potential for misuse. It advocates for careful negotiation and refinement of these clauses or, alternatively, their elimination to ensure...

When debating the pros and cons of economic regionalism, haven't we focused enough on trade in goods at the expense of services? This article argues that regionalism is certainly a building block, not a stumbling block to a multilateral trading system, using the services liberalization scheme of...

A common view holds that the trend toward Asian financial regionalism is a relatively new phenomenon that became significant after the Asian financial crisis of 1997/98. This paper challenges this view by exploring and analyzing financial regionalist projects in Asia throughout the 1990s. As...

Despite a commonplace view that Asian regionalism lacks institutions, Asia, in fact, is full of regional institutions and frameworks in various forms. The rise and fall of regional institutions in Asia is an extremely dynamic process. Using a game theory approach, this paper hypothesizes that...

Are trade facilitation measures under free trade agreements (FTAs) discriminatory? This important question has yet to be sufficiently explored by the existing literature on trade facilitation. Despite the multilateral scope and non-discriminatory objectives of trade facilitation measures, some...