Economic tradecraft is a set of duties, responsibilities and skills required of diplomats working in economic affairs. It is a key instrument in the diplomatic tradecraft toolbox. As is the case with their colleagues in the political career track, economic officers work both at diplomatic missions abroad and at headquarters. On the surface, it may appear that a country’s economic and commercial diplomats do the same type of work abroad, but that is not quite the case. Economic officers inform policymaking at headquarters by monitoring and analyzing economic trends and developments in the receiving state. They also advocate for host-government policies aimed at leveling the playing field for companies from the home country and against regulations that hurt those businesses. Commercial diplomats directly help industries and individual companies in starting or expanding business and investment in the host country. Conversely, they facilitate investment by local firms in the home country.

The White House is committed to 30 GW of new offshore wind by 2030 but there are extensive barriers and delays resulting from federal, state, and local government policies, as well as a lack of mature supply chains. What are these barriers and how can we address the issues?

The supply chain model has become the dominant mode of production in the globalised economy. While much attention has been placed on the downwards economic pressures of the model, little attention has been placed on the consequences for democratic participation. This chapter casts light on this area by examining how the supply chain model undermines democracy at work. It also raises the fundamental question of whether and how existing governance structures can be democratised, or whether and how new democratic institutions can be created that extend democratic underpinnings to globally expanding supply chains? Drawing on this we highlight that two distinct approaches to supply chain labour governance have emerged: one based on focussing on production relations and collective bargaining, and the other based on consumption relations and a CSR approach by brands. These approaches raise important questions that are central themes of the book such as what is the relationship between the representation of worker interests and consumer interests; who has the “right” to raise concerns about labour conditions in global supply chains; and can these contrasting approaches prove complementary?

Globalisation has placed democratic institutions under severe pressure as economic actors seek to take advantage of the disjuncture between national political governance and transnational economic activity. This chapter provides an introduction and overview as to the key themes to be addressed in the book. In particular, we highlight the debate between different approaches to democratic representation and associational democracy which is the theoretical framing for the remainder of the book: representation as claim versus representation as structure.

This case study aims to investigate whether and in what ways the EU and its Member States can support Kenya to strengthen opportunities to appropriately regulate and remedy human rights violations in the floriculture industry. This industry is almost exclusively occupied by corporations with Kenyan, European and Indian owners. Most of the flowers grown on Kenyan farms are sold in Europe. After discussing the Kenyan floriculture industrys history, this chapter considers the relevant legal commitments in the post-Cotonou agreement and the Economic Partnership Agreement between the East African Community and the EU. According to the constructivist literature, these agreements could serve as a platform through which Kenyan and transnational civil society can help to contribute to the creation of a ‘thick’ stakeholder consensus regarding human rights. Finally, this case study analyses whether people in Kenya can use justice institutions when their rights are violated by flower farms. All relevant mechanisms are evaluated, but it is concluded that capacity development of civil judicial remediation has the most potential. Fourteen Kenyan experts have been interviewed to write this case study.

This chapter aims to investigate the extent to which the Netherlands has attempted to rein in transnational corporations from developing and emerging states by imposing requirements as a matter of regulatory compliance, either directly as an obligation formulated in a rule, or indirectly by offering corporations the opportunity to defend against civil violations. Section 1 of this chapter examines the Dutch Child Labour Duty of Care Law (2019). An evaluation of the parliamentary debates increases our understanding as to whether and to what extent competition from non-Dutch corporations – and, in particular, transnational corporations from developing and emerging states – in the global marketplace has had an impact on the stringency and reach of this legislative initiative. Section 2 discusses the (largely hypothetical) avenues available to bring claims against transnational corporations from developing and emerging states in Dutch courts.

If Chapter 3 situated the problems facing contemporary tort law within EU law, it did not provide a comprehensive or novel model of liability. In Chapter 4, the key argument is that network liability in its incipient form can be detected in the law on 'private' gatekeepers of product liability, and this model can and should be applied equally to the state through reimagining Francovich liability. This move will also assist in developing the liability criteria, and the concept of a sufficient serious breach of EU law offers a coherent and normatively principled standard for the liability of secondary actors in public/private governance networks. It is then underlined that different existing models of liability should be understood as different means of recovery in networks. The central point is that these three models of liability – individual, organisational and network – should be placed within a more encompassing normative concept of network responsibility. This model of responsibility can, and should, be applied beyond the context of product liability as a template for solving problems of attribution and imputation in governance networks. The idea is tested in the context of value chain liability.

Mining products are essential in our lives. We need them to satisfy our everyday needs. The growing worldwide population, together with rising living standards, pushes up the demand for minerals. The mining industry faces continuous challenges to meet such demand and to fulfil the sustainability requirements imposed by the policy makers. Innovation is a key instrument to address these challenges. This chapter describes the mining industry and its major economic characteristics, discusses the role of innovation in the industry and the environment in which it takes place, and summarizes some of the major findings that emerge from the subsequent chapters in the book.

The pandemic has turned the world inward and toward such perennial false promises of self-sufficiency as localism and protectionism. The trade links made possible by global supply chains are being questioned along with all else that connects the global economy. Amid this questioning, in the ongoing battle to end the pandemic, tariffs and other barriers to trade in medicines and other medical goods must be eliminated; vaccine nationalism must be replaced by vaccine multilateralism; and trade restrictions on the global supply of food must be avoided.

Chapter 3 examines the international law attempts to regulate the financial aspects of war economies, in particular through UN sanctions. The chapter examines UN sanctions, in particular assets freezes and commodity sanctions, counterterrorism financing, attempts by the Council to police natural resource extraction in war zones, and efforts to create standards governing the regulation of commodity chains from conflict zones.

This chapter analyses the growing use of ethical certification schemes as a strategy to fight forced labor in the contemporary global economy. It draws on a large primary dataset from the Global Business of Forced Labour study, collected from 2016–2018, which sheds light into the business models of forced labor in the cocoa and tea industries as well as the effectiveness of ethical certification in combatting forced labor. Drawing on data that demonstrates that ethical certification schemes are failing to create worksites that are free from exploitation, I argue that ethical certification labelling is misleading consumers about the labor conditions involved in the goods they are buying. I explore the contradictions of selling "ethical" products that give the impression that goods have been made through labor standards that they are known to fall short of. I explore the challenge of modernizing historically successful strategies to combat slavery made-goods for use in the present.

This chapter explores the relationship between labor activism along global supply chains and labor politics in China. In particular, it investigates the extent to which Chinese workers have been involved in transnational labor networks, and the nature of their involvement. To date there is no systematic documentation of Chinese labor involvement in transnational campaigns, let alone campaigns specifically involving supply chains, in part because the repression of workers and activists by the authoritarian state presents challenges for empirical research. Nevertheless, this chapter offers an original analysis of five global union federations’ inclusion of Chinese labor in their transnational activities. The analysis reveals three categories of global unions’ engagement with Chinese workers or companies: (1) direct cooperation with Chinese workers, (2) solidarity actions on behalf of Chinese workers, and (3) campaigns on behalf of non-Chinese workers employed by Chinese companies. These findings provide a starting point that can inform future research on the relationship between global supply chains, transnational labor alliances, and the politics of workers’ rights in China.

The US-China trade war has a major impact on third countries. Using unique micro data from Japan, evidence is provided of the impact of the trade war on Japanese companies and their supply chains. First, it is found that tariffs and geopolitical risks in the USA and China are important factors affecting business plans of Japanese companies. Importantly, the share of Japanese companies reporting that tariffs and geopolitical risks affect the degree of uncertainty about their business plans increased significantly from 2017 to 2020. Second, Japanese affiliates in China with higher exposure to the North America-China trade saw a significant decline in sales and their parent firms had a drop in stock prices after the trade war. In addition, a recent firm survey shows that since the escalation of the Covid-19 pandemic, Japanese companies engaging in importing/exporting or having production bases in China tend to have higher subjective uncertainty over their future sales. These results suggest that the shocks of the trade war and the Covid-19 pandemic propagate across borders through global supply chains. Diversification of sourcing and sales may increase the resilience of supply chains.