The rapid digitalization of the economy has led to the proliferation of companies with primarily digital presences and global operations. This transformation has prompted governments worldwide to impose digital taxes on technology companies, sparking debates about the compatibility of such measures with international investment law. The introduction of digital taxes represents a significant departure from traditional territorial based tax principles, creating legal uncertainty and potentially discriminatory effects. And while the OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework aims to establish a multilateral solution to digital taxation, its implementation poses challenges, including potential investor claims. Against this backdrop, this chapter explores the implications of digital taxation on foreign investors’ rights under international investment agreements, by examining four key questions: whether digital assets can qualify as protected “investments” under investment treaties; whether digital taxes violate national treatment obligations by disproportionately burdening foreign investors; whether such measures breach the right to fair and equitable treatment, including legal stability; and whether they amount to unlawful indirect expropriation by neutralizing digital assets as investments. By addressing these issues, this chapter highlights the evolving interplay between digital taxation and international investment law, emphasizing the need for balanced solutions that mitigate conflicts while fostering legal certainty in the digital economy.

A timely response to the pressing issue of public pension reform, The Public Pension Crisis explores the complex relationship between contract law and government pensions, specifically focusing on the Contract Clause and related state Pension Clauses. Analyzing over a decade of litigation, the book highlights the evolving role of pension contracts in constitutional law and examines more than 70 landmark cases to establish a clear, principled framework for determining when pension benefits qualify as contractual obligations. T. Leigh Anenson presents a unified theory to consistently treat public and private pensions, balancing the interests of employees’ earned benefits with the financial challenges facing governments. Combining legal scholarship with practical policy insights, Anenson not only provides a much-needed legal perspective on pension reform but also calls for a systematic approach to addressing the retirement security crisis.

This chapter reviews the legislative history of the Clean Air Act (CAA) and the role of rent-seeking in affecting key aspects of the law. These aspects include uniform ambient air quality standards across a large, heterogeneous country; the prevention of significant air quality deterioration, even in areas above the national standards; and a new source review that requires the best available pollution control technologies in new facilities also in areas with air quality at or above the national standard. These policies might seem reasonable, except that they impose costs on sections of the country where there may be little corresponding net benefit. The question then arises as to why the CAA is structured in this manner. Are there transaction cost savings arising from these rules? Or are they better explained by rent-seeking among politicians, agency officials, industry and labor lobbyists, and environmental nongovernmental organizations?

Saving species from extinction as called for by the Endangered Species Act (ESA) can be a public good. If attention is directed to those species that have reasonable recovery potential and the costs are not too great, then the resources might be well spent. If they are devoted to those that have little chance for recovery, then the exercise may be less beneficial. Proponents argue that all species deserve a chance, but because real resources are involved, people are affected. They must support funding and costly resource-use restrictions over very long periods to list, protect, and enhance at-risk species. There are opportunity costs and tradeoffs. The process of endangered species protection then ought to be a reasoned one that weighs costs and benefits. There is no avoiding the challenge. Unfortunately, as detailed in this chapter, protecting endangered species has not been a reasoned process. It is contentious and combative. The record of success is extremely sparce. Rent-seeking undermines chances for long-term recovery for prospective species.

As business transactions and the global economy become increasingly digitalized, international investment disputes will deal with novel assets in new boundary-defiant contexts. Indeed, jurisdictional arguments and objections will likely require arbitral tribunals to confront with the uneasy task of delineating the ‘localization’ of investments in digital economy assets such as cryptocurrency, non-fungible tokens, and data-related investments. However, given that even more traditional assets have raised a variety of problems relating to territorial nexus and localization, the authors believe that the digital economy emphasizes what are essentially differences in degree rather than in kind. This chapter discusses the complexities that arise in considering the idiosyncrasies of investments in digital economy assets within a traditional territorially defined jurisdictional framework. First, the authors present some of those new digital economy assets and canvass several typical cross-border challenges inherent in international investment arbitration. Second, they question how traditional objections to jurisdiction ratione personae and jurisdiction ratione materiae might be employed when the investments in question relate to those digital developments. Third, the chapter raises questions about states’ jurisdiction to prescribe, and ponders the potential effects for purposes of jurisdiction of states asserting their authority to prescribe over investments or investors outside their territory.

The conventional risk–return management perspective explains how decarbonisation in the electricity sector and associated asset stranding impact the financial and real sectors. However, the perspective does not give satisfactory answers to the two research questions of the book: (1) why the Paris–Glasgow financial regime has been slow in progress, and (2) why emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs) with many young coal power plants are attracted to a shift to natural gas-based electricity systems instead of those based on renewable energy sources. This chapter illustrates the costs and benefits of electricity system transitions towards net zero using the research results presented in Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6. Our findings reveal that the benefit is substantially smaller than the total cost for EMDEs. The Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) can marginally addresses the gap because it maintains traditional financial risk–return thinking and optimal risk–return investments despite demanding substantial institutional and organisational reforms. While the variability of cost and benefit schedules presents opportunities for financing initiatives to accelerate net-zero transitions, such financing encounters challenges in getting acceptance from short-termist regulators and asset owners. We argue for institutional arrangements that capture the value of net-zero emissions.

National security concerns have long shaped international relations, with economic interdependence traditionally seen as fostering stability. However, recent geopolitical shifts have challenged this assumption. The strategic rivalry, particularly between the US and China, has raised the stakes of international competition and new forms of economic warfare. Historically committed to multilateralism, the EU faces pressures to reassess its approach due to an increasing use of economic coercion by other states. Emerging powers, particularly BRICS, are also redefining their roles in the global order, employing economic tools to counter Western hegemony. As unilateralism rises and the effectiveness of multilateral institutions like the WTO is questioned, a “new geo-economic order” appears to be emerging. This Chapter creates the basis for the normative and evaluative questions of this book by exploring how major economic players navigate national security concerns in an increasingly fragmented trade landscape.

The fifth chapter continues the excavation and evaluation of evidence in the making of a government pension contract by describing the circumstances under which reforms have proven effective against constitutional contention. It probes the power of reservation clauses, the credence of contemporary commentary like employee handbooks, the impact of persuasive authority, and the influence of the Supreme Court of the United States. It identifies which forms of proof have been the most effective and why, along with what matters have been missed. In assessing the evidence for and against the creation of a contract, this chapter prioritizes sources, comments on their respective import, and otherwise argues for courts to undertake an expansive inquiry to determine whether government pension benefits receive contract protection.

Trade and investment in services and intellectual property grows rapidly, driven by new technological advances, while servicification resolutely alters FDI patterns. As digital services trade grows, its aterritorial nature becomes a source of concern for policymakers and regulators, while companies affected by public interventions seek legal avenues to protect their rights, often throuth recourse to investor-State arbitration. Against this background, this chapter delves into the universe of digital services supply in an increasingly polarized international economic order. It identifies the challenges that servicification poses on international investment law, before focusing on the recent cases of TikTok (involving the digital services supply of the social media giant in the US) and Uber (relating to the service supply of the American company in Colombia and other countries) but also on Metaverse as a new challenge for economic regulation to discuss the applicable substantive investment law obligations and the scope for upholding national security concerns by the regulatory State. Throughout the chapter, I discuss related challenges that regulatory authorities face by emerging patterns in services trade and investment; the potential impact of measures such as geoblocking, bans or ringfencing; and the repercussions of such geo-economic fragmentation for the investment regime.

Achieving the long-term goals of the Paris Agreement requires a rapid fossil fuel phase-out, mainly of coal power generation. However, the Southeast Asian region has been increasing reliance on coal power, which can be associated with higher stranded costs. This chapter conducted scenario analyses to estimate new installations and stranded assets in the electricity sector that align with the Paris Agreement in this region. The results showed that fossil fuel capacity stranding and new capacity installations must be around 62.8–93.2 GW (USD 224–272 billion) and 590–672 GW (USD 1.9–2.0 trillion) from 2021 to 2050, respectively, to achieve Nationally Determined Contributions and net-zero emissions. The magnitude of stranded assets would vary by technological availability. Stranded assets and new investment requirements for renewable energy become higher unless carbon capture and storage systems are commercially available. High gas prices, which undermine new investments in gas power plants, potentially reduce stranded assets but increase new installation costs for other technologies.

This chapter takes the Philippines as a case to elucidate the direction and speed of electricity system transition under a vertically unbundled, competitive wholesale market model, with a focus on changes in the complementary elements of the electricity system. The study employed the analytical framework based on the grid paradigm presented in Chapter 3. The results showed that despite institutional development consistent with systems based on renewable-energy-sourced electricity (RES-E), delays in infrastructure development in high-voltage backbone and interconnection transmission grids and restrictive RES-E policy have stimulated investments in new coal power plants and deterred transitions to RES-based systems. Energy security concerns about the perceived growth of electricity demand and depletion of domestic gas fields motivated the government to use natural gas as additional generation fuel rather than balancing power. Energy oligarchs capitalised on the moratorium on new coal plants to supply ancillary services from fully depreciated coal power, investing in large-scale battery energy storage systems and gas power assets, and increasing economic gains. These factors are likely to direct the Philippines towards a natural-gas-based electricity system, combining the flexible paradigm in the RES-based system with a few clean dispatchable capacities.