Special and differential treatment (SDT) has a long history in international trade negotiations. Born as a response to the development gap in the multilateral fora, S&DT has evolved as a set of substantive and procedural rules aimed at providing developing countries with broader policy space. Latin-American countries, which had fostered the creation and improvement of S&DT rules in the GATT-WTO, have faced different challenges in the negotiation of these provisions in their preferential trade agreements (PTAs). This chapter explores the scope of S&DT principles and operative clauses included in Latin-American trade agreements since the early 2000s. The main contributions of this chapter are, first, to present S&DT as a cross-cutting topic in PTAs; second, to bring to light the evolution of development-related policy space in trade agreements recently signed in the region; and third, to assess differences in the legal S&DT architecture across PTAs.

This chapter focuses on how Bangladesh, a country with extensive experience of climate-related disasters, has dealt with loss and damage in its national policymaking. In response to its high vulnerability, Bangladesh is – among the countries studied in this book – a role model in disaster reduction and preparedness. However, the government’s efforts do not meet the scope of needs connected to climate impacts on the ground. Drawing on a review of relevant policy documents and semi-structured interviews with key public and civil society actors, the chapter analyzes national-level engagement with loss and damage from climate change in Bangladesh. It demonstrates that while fundamentally all ministries in Bangladesh are involved in averting, minimizing, or addressing loss and damage, the concept is yet to be fully integrated in national policy. The chapter also finds that existing policies tend to focus on addressing economic losses and overlook the significant noneconomic losses from climate change. It is argued that integrating loss and damage into national policies, establishing a fair national mechanism, and creating a comprehensive database of loss and damage data would strengthen Bangladesh’s role as both an advocate for loss and damage governance and a leader in climate response.

Chapter 4 presents the lexical dimension to Balkan linguistic convergence, treating first loanwords from various sources, Balkan and non-Balkan, into the Balkan sprachbund languages, at successive historical periods, e.g. from Greek and Latin in ancient times, from Slavic in Byzantine times, from Romance languages during the Crusades, from Turkish in the Ottoman period, and, more recently, from West European languages. The borrowing material surveyed includes both words and affixes. A key innovative construct is introduced for the typology of loanwords by focusing on a significant group of items that must have been borrowed through the medium of conversational interaction. Such conversationally based loans, neologistically referred to as “ERIC” loans (for those “Essentially Rooted In Conversation”) are exemplified through the borrowing of various closed class items, including both grammatical forms like complementizers and pronouns and discourse markers, many of which come from Turkish. Particular attention is given as well to taboo words in the Balkans, to shared phraseology—including shared idioms and proverbs—to shared semantics (isosemy), to shared expressive forms involving reduplication and onomatopoeia. Finally, the lexical side of shared style and register is discussed.

We have focused in this final chapter on the lessons learned about sprachbunds in general and the Balkans in particular, as the originally identified, and still relevant, exemplar of the concept. But there are important findings having to do with contact linguistics that are worth recounting here. We have already mentioned our innovative notion of ERIC loans, and we trust that our arguments for this notion can be relevant for scholars working in other regions. Similarly, we hope that our enunciation of our “four-M model” for sprachbund formation will find echoes and applicability elsewhere.1 But especially, given the continued, if unjustifiably controversial, status of the claim that the borrowing of structure and grammar is possible, a controversy brought to the fore in the modern linguistic era through the discussion in Thomason & Kaufman 1988, we consider it important also to remind readers, in closing, that the Balkans offer numerous instances in which structure and/or grammar have clearly made their way from one grammatical system into another.

What explains a preference for one trading partner over another? We present three broad answers to this question that focus on economic interests, geopolitical concerns, and political ideology. Empirically, we address the question by investigating the trade partner preferences of citizens and members of parliament in Latin America. With respect to the former, we rely on data from the Latinobarómetro that asked respondents about their evaluation of trade with the United States and China. In terms of the latter, we use the Latin American Elites Database, which contains data from surveys of legislators since 1994. By combining data gathered from citizens and political elites, we can highlight similarities and differences in trade partner preferences across these two types of actors. The results indicate that political ideology is an important predictor of preferences for trading partners for both political elites and citizens. By contrast, economic considerations only matter for legislators’ preferences and geopolitical considerations only for citizens’ preferences.

Chile has begun to play a new leadership role on loss and damage in the international negotiations. Historically, Chile engaged little with loss and damage discussions in negotiations, but this changed with its presidency of the twenty-fifth Conference of Parties in 2019. Drawing on a review of the domestic policy landscape and institutional responses to loss and damage as well as fourteen interviews with key government, non-governmental organization, and private sector actors, this chapter suggests that while the presidency role acted as a driver for Chile taking the lead on the topic at the international level, the country’s economic identity acts as a constraint on the domestic development of adequate responses to loss and damage and on engagement with the loss and damage terminology. It also finds that Chile’s centralism and lack of ministerial coordination as well as the relatively institutionally weak position of the Ministry of the Environment limits more effective loss and damage governance. The chapter further argues that loss and damage as a concept has not permeated Chilean civil society. Finally, it demonstrates that Chile’s prioritization of economic growth and its extractivist economy undermine efforts to meaningfully address loss and damage at the national level.

Chile has built one of the largest networks of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) in the world. While Chile’s initial objectives in PTAs focused on trade expansion, their scope has expanded to cover new issues and go deeper to include various behind-the-border measures. Therefore, an assessment of the impact of Chile’s PTAs beyond their effects on trade flows is imperative and may shed light on the impact of PTAs in general. Specifically, this chapter assesses the impact of trade in services provisions on women’s labor force participation, particularly in the services sector. We argue that the inclusion of services provisions in PTAs can promote the development of the services sector in the economy as a whole, which should have a positive impact on women’s employment. In addition, we find that the impact of PTAs on women’s employment should be more pronounced than on men’s, which in turn should help to reduce gender gaps in this sector. The chapter draws on new data and advanced methodologies to test our hypotheses. The results of the chapter show that the inclusion of services has a positive impact on women’s employment. The estimation results suggest that the inclusion of deep services provisions in Chilean PTAs had a positive impact on women’s employment, especially in the services sector. For men, the results show a negative or insignificant effect. Finally, the analysis of the impact of these provisions on gender gaps shows that these agreements have contributed to reducing gender gaps in the labor force.