This paper tests the hypothesis pertaining to the interdependencies between trade and environmental policies in the presence of industry/firm lobbies, which is captured through industry/firm size. For an unbalanced panel of manufacturing firms in India at the five-digit National Industrial Classification (NIC), 2008 for the period 2008–2019, I find that firm size has a positive and significant impact on trade policy. The same holds true for a subset of firms that are polluting in nature (based on the Central Pollution Control Board classification). It is found that larger firms have a greater influence on those trade policies that are set unilaterally by the government. Also, there is no empirical support in favour of trade and environment linkages in the Indian context. This could be due to the fact that these two policies come under the domain of independent ministries of the government. Moreover, environmental safety assumes less significance and tends to adversely affect the competitiveness of the manufacturing sector. Notwithstanding the fact that environmental regulations are in place, the enforcement and monitoring mechanisms are remarkably weak on account of weak environmental institutions.

Alan Winters was the editor of the World Trade Review (WTR) from December 2008 to mid-2020. Launched in 2002 as a joint initiative of the WTO Secretariat and Cambridge University Press, the WTR has become the leading multidisciplinary journal in the field of international trade broadly defined. In the period during which Alan was editor of the journal, the number of issues grew from three to five, reflecting the significant increase in the number of quality submissions. The impact factor of the journal rose to 1.6 in 2020, an increase by 150%, above that of The World Economy, arguably the incumbent in the field when the WTR was created.

International Economic Law (IEL) has largely regulated cross-border trade and investment in the post-WWII world. IEL has become an important part of the Liberal International Order that prescribes a set of rule-based relationships for international cooperation based on political liberalism, economic liberalism, and liberal internationalism. However, economic globalization has witnessed a relative decline, especially after the 2008 global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. This form of ‘de-globalization’ challenges the assumptions upon which modern IEL is premised. This introductory article to the special issue on ‘Domestic Investment Laws and International Economic Law in the Liberal International Order’ explains how domestic law has started playing an increasingly important role in regulating foreign investment. Often overlooked instruments such as Domestic Investment Laws, Investment Screening Mechanisms, and Investment Promotion Agencies are now important tools in promoting or restricting foreign investment flows. Expanding on this premise, the article examines the transition from international to domestic in the Liberal International Order with a focus on Domestic Investment Laws. The move to domestic law does not signal a new era of economic isolation for States. Instead, it presents an effort to achieve similar ends of attracting foreign investors using different means while exercising more control over foreign investment.

This paper provides a systemic study of China's policy and legal responses to security-related actions and disputes in the international trade regime. It starts with a brief review of the law and practices relating to the security exceptions under the World Trade Organization to provide an important context for understanding the recent developments of China's approaches to national security. Based on a detailed discussion of China's approaches at international and domestic levels, we argue that China's security strategy has been shifting from being defensive to proactive: internationally by seeking to influence the development of trade rules and practices, and domestically by expanding national security to cover a wide spectrum of economic security interests and developing a comprehensive regulatory framework to protect such interests. The way in which major trading nations are taking the law into their own hands, based on ever-expanding security interests, does not bode well for the future of the multilateral trading system. There is a pressing need for collective action by all governments involved to re-design security-related rules and exceptions to confine the use of security measures to agreed parameters.

This article considers the past, present, and future of domestic investment laws. Its focus is on the ‘facilitative’ investment law, which aims to encourage foreign investment by granting substantive protections to foreign investors and consent to international arbitration over disputes with foreign investors. The article first contends that states had independent reasons to enact such facilitative investment laws alongside investment treaties, even though investment treaties perform very similar functions. Secondly, the article argues that investment laws can be characterized either as unilaterally assumed international obligations of states or simply as domestic laws of states, with differing consequences under each characterization. Thirdly, the article proposes four possible futures for facilitative investment laws: contamination, continuation, compromise, and contestation.

This paper offers a comprehensive study of the jurisprudence on the ‘as a result of unforeseen developments’ test under the WTO's safeguards (SG) rules. It contributes to the existing scholarship by making three fresh arguments. First, the Appellate Body's decision to ‘revive’ this test as a prerequisite for the application of SG measures is not necessarily incompatible with the drafting record of the SG Agreement, even though this agreement does not make explicit reference to the test. Second, the test is not excessively difficult to satisfy under the standard of review established by case law, even though governments failed to pass it in almost all SG disputes to date. Third, in sharp contrast, the recent US–Safeguard Measure on PV Products decision took a strikingly more deferential approach which fell far short of the established standard of review, leading to the first and only decision in which the test was found to be satisfied. This decision has arguably created a new standard which could lead to abuse of SG measures and damage to the dispute settlement system and hence should be avoided in future disputes.

Globalization and robotics (globotics) are jointly transforming the world economy at an explosive pace. While much of the literature has focused on rich nations, the changes are quite likely to affect developing nations in important ways. The premise of the paper – which should be regarded as a thought-piece – is based on an extreme thought experiment. What does development look like when digital technology has rendered manufacturing jobless and many services freely traded? Our conclusion is that the service-led development path may become the norm rather than the exception; think India, not China. Since success in the service sector is based on quite different factors than success in manufacturing, development strategies and mindsets may have to change. This is an optimistic conclusion since it suggests that developing nations can directly export the source of their comparative advantage – low-cost labour – without having first to make goods with that labour.

This paper examines the economic implications of the tariff increases by the United States and by China during the Trump era trade dispute and the gains from their potential removal. The increases were dramatic, with the US raising tariffs on industrial products by a factor of six – with particularly large tariff increases on intermediate and capital goods – and China increasing its tariffs on US agricultural products more than five-fold. These changes distort trade and production decisions in both countries and undercut the global trading system. They resulted in substantial economic losses to each country, with import volumes reduced by 4.9% in China and 4.5% in the USA, and bilateral trade patterns were massively distorted. Their cost to the United States rose at the end of 2021, when the import expansion provisions of the Trump era Phase One Agreement expired. Negotiating the abolition of these costly and disruptive tariffs would generate substantial real income gains for both countries and help lower US consumer prices.

In the wake of the demise of the WTO's Appellate Body, there has been a growing trend of states resorting to the dispute settlement mechanisms under their regional trade agreements (RTAs) to resolve international trade disputes. While the vast majority of these mechanisms have never been used, many contain defective procedural provisions that are likely to slow down or completely derail the dispute settlement process should those provisions be invoked. This is particularly true of mechanisms that effectively permit a respondent to block or delay the composition of a panel to hear a dispute. This article examines the issues of ‘panel blocking’ and panel composition delay tactics in RTA dispute settlement with reference to both past and present practice, and provides a textual analysis of a cross-section of existing RTAs to identify procedural defects and prescribe solutions for ensuring timely panel composition in future disputes.

This Article identifies the problems of an Appellate Mechanism for ISDS Tribunals in relation with its possible benefits. We propose the inclusion of certain design features to improve the working of an eventual Appellate Mechanism and help mitigate problems related to procedural, conflict resolution, and substantive concerns. We finish by identifying the most central problems with a possible Appellate Mechanism, which helps to narrow down options within the ongoing reform process at UNCITRAL. Overall, we illustrate how institutional choice is always contextual and that all institutional options are imperfect and subject to important trade-offs.

Domestic Investment Laws (DILs), a prominent tool of contemporary unilateral International Economic Law (IEL) in the context of the Liberal International Order (LIO), consistently provide for investment incentives as a key aspect of domestic industrial policies geared to influence investment location decisions. The various types of investment incentives include fiscal measures to attract investment, direct subsidies, and other regulatory measures aimed at creating favorable administrative and regulatory conditions for investment. This article analyzes how the provisions of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreements contain basic disciplines and set limitations for the distortive effects of investment incentives. It is argued that the relevance of WTO law for domestic investment incentives should not be under-stated; rather, DILs providing investment incentives should be treated as a limited exception to the ongoing move from international to domestic in the era of the LIO.

With a modified formalization of Heckscher–Ohlin theory as the basis of a novel econometric specification, this paper uses worldwide data over three decades to estimate how the effects of greater openness on industrialization vary among countries with differing endowments of land relative to labour. The results confirm the theoretical prediction that greater openness reduces manufactured output shares in land-abundant countries, while increasing them in land-scarce countries. The implications of these results for trade and development policy are debatable.

We investigate tax fraud in a major export-promotion program in India – the Duty Drawback scheme – which enables exporting firms to claim a cash rebate proportional to the value of their exports, at a product-specific drawback rate. We detect fraud based on two approaches. First, we show that bilateral trade asymmetries between reported exports by India and reported imports by trading partners of the same trade flows are systematically correlated with the rate of drawback, suggesting that exporting firms over-report exports to unduly gain duty drawback. Second, we find evidence of excess bunching in the distribution of unit values reported by India at kinks in the per-unit drawback schedule, relative to the distribution of unit values reported by importing countries. Our results suggest that fraud currently detected by customs represents only 3.8%–6% of actual fraud.

A persisting question about investment treaties is whether they lead to regulatory chill – the reluctance to regulate on environmental and social issues due to fear of investment claims. The literature on this topic has been predominantly focussed on how the state responds to international pressures, and little has been written about what happens within the state itself. This article aims to fill that gap by analysing the interplay of domestic laws and institutions in the context of potential investment claims, based on the case study of mining in the Santurbán páramo region in Colombia. The article shows that even though Colombia had created laws and institutions that internalized international investment law, it did not bring about regulatory chill in the case of Santurbán; this is due to the role of domestic constitutional law and the Constitutional Court. This case study also adds to the understanding of how the Liberal International Order is shifting from international to domestic governance, by showing how domestic laws and institutions can have diverging priorities when determining how the risk of investment claims is dealt with.

This paper develops a Heckscher−Ohlin model in which the effects on production structure of endowments and changes in trade policies depend in a continuous way on a country's degree of openness to trade. Its main contribution is to show semi-formally how the introduction of product differentiation causes the elasticities of output with respect both to factor endowments and to sectoral trade barriers to vary with import penetration (the share of foreign firms in home markets) and export orientation (the share of foreign markets in home-firm sales).

In this contribution, we exploit machine learning techniques to evaluate whether and how close firms are to become successful exporters. First, we train various algorithms using financial information on both exporters and non-exporters in France in 2010–2018. Thus, we show that it is possible to predict the distance non-exporters are from export status. In particular, we find that a Bayesian Additive Regression Tree with Missingness In Attributes (BART-MIA) performs better than other techniques with an accuracy of up to 0.90. Predictions are robust to changes in definitions of exporters and in the presence of discontinuous exporting activity. Eventually, we discuss how our exporting scores can be helpful for trade promotion, trade credit, and assessing aggregate trade potential. For example, back-of-the-envelope estimates show that a representative firm with just below-average exporting scores needs up to 44% more cash resources and up to 2.5 times more capital to get to foreign markets.

Failure to reestablish an effective World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement procedure, stop the erosion of multilateral rules and end the China–US trade war causes capitals to rethink trade policy. One response is to redouble efforts to strike trade agreements with major trading partners. Already countries accounting for about 78% of world Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are members of mega-regional agreements, and based on our computations, preferential trade agreements (PTAs) will soon cover about two-thirds of world trade. Can PTAs replace a fading WTO or mitigate its effects? Amid deepening geopolitical rifts, how will trade relations among China, the EU, and the US, each a hegemon in their respective regions, evolve, and what will be the impact on smaller economies? In short, how will a trading system based increasingly on PTAs and weak multilateral rules look, and how will nations adapt? Absent reforms, the trading system is likely to fragment progressively into regional blocks organized around the hegemons. Trade within the regional blocks, mainly conducted under a mega-regional agreement, will likely remain quite open and predictable, but without strict multilateral rules and where PTAs are absent (as they are among the hegemons), interregional trade relations will become increasingly uncertain and unstable.

There is limited evidence about the role that participating in international trade has on the diffusion of technologies. This paper analyzes the impact of exporting on firms’ adoption of technologies that are more sophisticated, using a novel dataset, the Firm-level Adoption of Technology (FAT) survey, that includes more than 1,500 firms from Brazil. The survey provides detailed information about the use of more than 300 technologies, combined with data from Brazil's census of formal workers (RAIS) and Brazil’s exports data from the Ministry of Trade. To address some critical endogeneity concerns, we apply a difference-in-differences estimation with multiple periods to examine the effects of entering export markets on technology adoption. We find that exporting has positive effects on firms’ likelihood of adopting advanced technologies in business functions related with business administration, production planning, supply chain management, and quality control, which are important to manage tasks associated to export activities.

In today's data-driven economy, data have been dubbed as the new oil. Hence, a close relationship is shared between the increasing amounts of international investments and the increasing volumes of cross-border data flows. The aim of this article is to discuss the legal aspects of the new data paradigm in the international economy and place this discussion in the larger framework of globalization and the Liberal International Order. The central thesis of the article revolves around the crucial role played by domestic laws in the fragmentation of international investment law. The article further discusses the interplay between national and international legal landscapes and how the changing nature of the Liberal International Order is affecting the flow of data across borders. In this context, it also discusses the issues that are presented by a lack of any comprehensive international framework governing Cross-Border Data Flows. The need to update existing agreements and laws in order to factor in digital investment is also highlighted.

The recent change towards advanced technologies favors skill-intensive labor, motivating workers to upgrade their educational achievements to the tertiary level. However, workers in many developing countries cannot exploit the opportunity for premium wages in skill-intensive sectors owing to insufficient education facilities and resources. In such contexts, aid to education provides a capacity-building tool to eliminate the insufficiency but is often unsuccessful. Using theories of trade and human capital, this study argues that complementarity between education aid and skill-intensive manufactured exports creates a synergistic effect in upgrading educational achievements by rectifying both structural and incentive constraints. Through extensive data analysis, the result demonstrates that skill-intensive exports enhance aid's effectiveness in increasing tertiary school enrollment, whereas neither exports nor aid alone significantly affect enrollment. It further shows that the aid–export complementarity is less relevant in low-income countries, whereas skill-intensive exports alone promote education upgrading in developed countries via the Stolper–Samuelson effect.