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15 - The Regime Complex for Investment Governance

Overlapping Provisions in PTAs and BITs

from Part IV - Diffusion across Economic Treaties

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2019

By
Soo Yeon Kim  and
Clara Lee
Edited by
Manfred Elsig ,
Michael Hahn  and
Gabriele Spilker
Manfred Elsig
Affiliation:
Universität Bern, Switzerland
Michael Hahn
Affiliation:
Universität Bern, Switzerland
Gabriele Spilker
Affiliation:
Universität Salzburg
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Summary

This chapter investigates the overlapping nature of investment governance, in which BITs and PTAs encode common commitments toward the protection and liberalization of investment. It advances the scholarship on regime complexity, in which non-hierarchical and overlapping institutions regulate investment. The study examines common institutional design across PTAs and BITS, while recognizing that the broader investment regime complex includes legal precedents set through dispute settlement at the WTO and ICSID. Utilizing an original data set of investment provisions in PTAs and for BITS data provided by UNCTAD’s International Investment Agreements (IIA) project, the analysis examines how these two international agreements have co-evolved in terms of institutional design in guiding principles, scope, and enforcement. The hypothesis is that these two types of agreements are largely complementary, where PTAs emphasize liberalization of investment in tandem with other trade-related provisions, and BITs emphasize the protection of investments and investor rights. The results of principal component analysis of provisions in PTAs and BITs support the hypothesis of complementarity. Additional analyses also show that investment provisions in PTAs draw heavily from those of BITs, but BITs draw less from PTAs.

Keywords

preferential trade agreementsbilateral investment treatiesregime complexinvestmentgovernanceinstitutional design
Type
Chapter
Information
The Shifting Landscape of Global Trade Governance
World Trade Forum
 , pp. 359 - 387
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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