International trade law is a subset of public international law and consists of the rules governing trade between nations. Historically this area of law was primarily concerned with trade in goods, but now includes trade in services (effectively the cross-border supply and consumption of services) and trade in intellectual property. International trade law has relevance to other fields of international economic law, including investment law. However, the focus of this chapter is on trade law as conducted under the auspices of the World Trade Organization (WTO), an organisation that commenced on 1 January 1995. This chapter briefly introduces these concepts, and then explains the current structure of the WTO. It then covers the core disciplines of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 1994 and the main exceptions to these disciplines, before turning to the safeguards, dumping and subsidies regimes. The chapter then introduces the two agreements that cover regulatory standards at the WTO, and finally provides an overview of the General Agreement on Trade in Services.

The plurilateral negotiations in the WTO on services domestic regulation and investment facilitation for development, commonly referred to as joint statement initiatives, were running in parallel until the end of 2021. Both negotiations seek to devise or have come up with disciplines that would apply good regulatory principles to WTO members’ regulatory procedures and requirements affecting services trade and cross-border investment. These disciplines pursue the objective of creating a more transparent and predictable regulatory environment that would facilitate the uptake of economic activities by (foreign) services/service suppliers and investors. This chapter examines the approach taken by the two initiatives to regulatory disciplines. It shows that their approach to regulatory disciplines is largely similar, but their stance on special and differential treatment sets them apart.

This chapter assesses whether the adoption of the Investment Facilitation for Development (IFD) Agreement would bring a transformative change to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and analyzes its relationship with WTO agreements related to trade in goods and intellectual property rights. The study finds that rules under existing WTO agreements already apply to measures related to investment to some extent, despite the long-time reluctance of WTO members to introduce investment rules. The IFD Agreement would complement existing WTO agreements and contribute to enhanced transparency and streamlined administrative procedures and requirements. As international transactions expand beyond traditional trade in goods to services and intellectual properties, the multilateral rules under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the WTO have evolved to cover such areas. The IFD Agreement is seen as another step in the evolutionary development of the WTO, rather than a transformative change. Formal negotiations on the IFD Agreement began in September 2020.

This chapter examines how the multilateral discussion on a multilateral framework on Investment Facilitation for Development (IFD) currently taking place at the World Trade Organization (WTO) differs from provisions on the same topic found in existing international investment agreements (IIAs). For that purpose, it defines investment facilitation and presents its main elements and a typology of its more common provisions. The chapter then reviews existing IIAs that include investment facilitation provisions, identifying regulatory convergence (or lack thereof) across them. Finally, it discusses whether there is an added value of the IFD compared to existing IIAs and if there is room for innovation in the current negotiations.

Investment facilitation provisions are incorporated in many international investment agreements (IIAs). Especially, because investment facilitation measures have their root in international trade law and investment law and national law, disputes concerning these measures could be settled through methods in these different legal regimes. Notably, such disputes could be submitted to investor–state dispute settlement (ISDS) or WTO dispute settlement, or both, by different types of disputants and relying on different treaties or laws. This makes settlement of investment facilitation disputes a complicated issue. This chapter presents a structural review of the issue of settlement of investment facilitation disputes, including dispute prevention, settlement of investment facilitation disputes through ISDS, and WTO dispute settlement, and explores the issue of parallel jurisdiction over investment facilitation disputes.

We quantify the impacts of a potential Investment Facilitation for Development (IFD) Agreement under negotiation at the World Trade Organization (WTO). The analysis is based on an innovative multiregion general equilibrium simulation model including bilateral representative firms. Consideration is given to foreign direct investment (FDI) and monopolistic competition. The model shows empirically relevant gains associated with removal of investment barriers in the form of transaction costs faced by foreign investors. The expected global welfare gains range between 0.56% and 1.74% depending on the depth of a potential IFD Agreement. The benefits are concentrated among the participants of the agreement with the highest welfare increase for the low-income and middle-income countries. Notable spillovers accrue to nonparticipants, which can be further increased by joining the agreement. Our results contribute to the relatively scarce research on investment facilitation and provide policymakers with information on the potential effects of the negotiated IFD Agreement.

This chapter uses the investment facilitation index (IFI) to map the adoption of over 100 investment facilitation measures in more than 140 countries. The study finds a wide variation in investment facilitation frameworks across and within world regions and income groups, with measures related to internal and external cooperation less frequently adopted in low-income countries. Few countries have well-functioning single-window mechanisms, and focal points are either completely missing or lacking many important functions. The study highlights the importance of binding multilateral commitments and support structures for implementing investment facilitation reforms in countries of lower income levels, as foreseen in the nascent Investment Facilitation for Development Agreement. The findings suggest potential for regional and international initiatives through peer-learning and sharing of best practices to improve investment facilitation frameworks worldwide.

This chapter examines how the facilitation of foreign direct investment (FDI) through the World Trade Organization (WTO) can contribute to fulfilling the right to development and achieving UN Sustainable Development Goals. It assesses how the WTO facilitates investment related to sustainable development in developing countries through liberalization of trade in services, restrictions on trade-related investment measures, and promotion of intellectual property rights. The study finds that reform efforts to make these WTO disciplines more conducive to sustainable development have been slow and of limited significance. The chapter also looks at how investment is facilitated through investment treaties and domestic investment legislation, highlighting the importance of domestic investment legislation for promoting investment for sustainable development, particularly for least developed countries. Finally, the chapter discusses whether and how the draft WTO Investment Facilitation for Development Agreement can most effectively achieve its objective in relation to countries most in need of development-related investment, considering the relative roles of the home and host states of FDI.

Investment facilitation, aiming for improvements in the transparency, efficiency, and predictability of domestic investment frameworks, plays an important role in complementing currently prevailing international measures for attracting external development. Finance and various investment facilitation reform initiatives are under way at multiple levels. However, empirical evidence on currently prevailing levels of adoption of investment facilitation measures and resulting reform and support needs is still scarce.

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have become the main vehicle to extend rules disciplining government procurement practices to non-signatories of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Agreement on Government Procurement. In fact, PTAs with deep procurement provisions have proliferated over time, with the majority entering into effect in the last two decades. This chapter discusses and examines the coverage of government procurement in recently concluded PTAs with a view to examining their relationship with the WTO, assessing potential gaps in their coverage, and pointing out new areas that are likely to gain prominence as preferential procurement provisions in the near future. The chapter also suggests ways and mechanisms by which PTAs can incorporate these new issues.

Regulating subsidies and state enterprises is a challenging exercise since, arguably, no other area touches more directly on the state intervention in the economy and on the various ideas and interests surrounding it. Taking stock of the acquis in regulating subsidies and state enterprises in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and in preferential trade agreements (PTAs), this chapter aims to develop a conceptual framework to help think about new rules, using the notions of principles, standards, and rules, as well as those of institutions, procedures and remedies. The chapter also delves into the process necessary to produce such rules. Using this conceptual framework, the gist of the analysis is that, to a large extent, there is no need to reinvent the wheel but to build upon the status quo under the WTO and many PTAs – which, importantly, already reflects the common agreement of many governments. In terms of process to follow to generate new rules, the importance of transparency, knowledge-generating activities and epistemic communities is duly underlined.

Despite the promise of a well-ordered trading system and expansion of trade liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s, why is trade governance deadlocked? This puzzle is addressed by elaborating the meaning of “crisis of success” and what such a crisis looks like at the global trading order. I argue that the global trading system is revealing a “crisis of success” in that its current failure to ensure functional trade liberalization change is a result of the initial accomplishment in successfully undergoing a power shift in global trade governance especially at the WTO, marked by greater inclusion of new emerging powers. The success of the initial first phase of trade governance (1990s–2008/2012), especially in aiding an institutional power shift at the global level, created conditions for new problems, leading to a fragmented turn toward preferential trade agreements as well as trade-mediated conflictual strategies rather than sustainable peaceful change. The chapter’s dynamic historical argument delineates how early successes in global trade policies and governance led to maximalist peaceful change, followed by crisis leading to greater use of tariffs and ensuing US–China economic and trade competition. The mechanisms that underwrote the paradox of crisis despite institutional strength are elaborated.

This chapter identifies three distinct reasons why China took a middle-of-the-road position in the debate on the COVID-19 TRIPS waiver at the WTO. It also recounts the country’s more assertive position in the run-up to the adoption of the Ministerial Decision on the waiver. Drawing eight lessons from the international debate on the waiver and the subsequent Ministerial Decision, the chapter offers insights into the future role China can or will play in future international policy debates at the intersection of intellectual property and public health, including during the next pandemic.

The protection of intellectual property (IP) is a question of life and death. COVID-19 vaccines, partially incentivized by IP, are estimated to have saved nearly 20 million lives worldwide during the first year of their availability in 2021. The vast majority of the benefit of this lifesaving technology, however, went to high- and upper-middle-income countries. Despite 10 billion vaccines having been produced by the end of 2021, only 4 percent of people in low-income countries were fully vaccinated. Paradoxically, IP may also be partly responsible for hundreds of thousands of lives lost in 2021, due to insufficient supply of vaccines and inequitable access during the critical first year of vaccine rollout, most notably in low-income countries that lacked the ability to buy or manufacture vaccines to save their populations. The contributors to this book diagnose a number of causes for the inequitable distribution of life-saving COVID-19 vaccines, from misguided reliance on intellectual property rights and voluntary mechanisms to share knowledge and vaccines, to the rise of vaccine nationalism and vaccine diplomacy, to unequal global intellectual property institutions that disenfranchise low-income countries and continue to reproduce colonial era dependency by poor countries on high income nations for life-saving technologies. Global experts herein suggest several reforms to prevent such inequity in the next pandemic, including delinking vaccine development from monopoly rights in technology, enhanced legal requirements to share publicly-funded technologies in pandemic times, and investment in technology transfer hubs and local vaccine manufacturing capacity in low and middle-income countries.

Authors in this volume make a wide range of important proposals on intellectual property, innovation, and access. The question this chapter asks is: which of these might work in an actual pandemic? By tracing the first year of COVID-19 vaccine distribution, it shows the critical importance of aligning choice of policy mechanisms with political forces. Indeed, it argues that an openness paradigm may have been more effective not only for reasons of justice, but because it could accommodate populist politics and vaccine nationalism.