Suchergebnisse

Product standards, regulations, and conformity assessment procedures are important and necessary, but they also, at times, threaten the free flow of goods in international markets and the competitive positions of many exporters, including those in the United States. The barriers to trade that may result form product standards and regulations may be inadvertent or deliberate. The problem cuts across a wide array of industries, from motor vehicles to computers to televisions to food and beverages. This book, part of the Brookings Integrating National Economies series, is the first to blend careful economic and legal analysis of technical barriers. Alan O. Sykes illustrates how standards and regulations create trade barriers, explores the extent of the problem, and considers the possible policy responses. The effects of technical barriers are hard to measure. They are often hidden in the costs of modifying a product to meet a standard or regulation, in the costs of testing and certification procedures, and in the ways that noncompliance with a standard may affect consumer purchasing decisions. Sykes identifies why heterogeneity in standards and regulations may arise across jurisdictions and assesses the desirability of eliminating it in various settings. Sykes also presents an extensive and insightful overview of current international efforts to police technical barriers in the WTO/GATT system, in the European Union, in the U.S. federal system, and NAFTA. He shows how least-restrictive means principles and their corollaries can do much to reduce technical barriers, while stopping short of impinging on the legitimate exercise of national sovereignty. Efforts to harmonize internatioal policies and set common standards and regulations have been under way for decades. Sykes evaluates the harmonization activities of institutions such as the International

AbstractThe COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by shortages and potential shortages of products critical to the public health response. Many nations have responded with export restrictions on these products, restrictions that are permitted under international trade law as a temporary response to short supply conditions generally and to public health emergencies in particular. This Essay argues that such export restrictions are economically counterproductive from a global efficiency perspective, and that governments acting unilaterally will nevertheless employ them due to international externalities that propagate through the "terms of trade." This observation raises a puzzle as to why international law should facilitate rather than curtail them. The most plausible answer is that legal authority for such measures is a politically necessary "escape clause" in trade agreements, akin to safeguard measures.

AbstractThis Article argues that international investment agreements (IIAs) serve a dual economic function—to discipline host country policies that impose international externalities on foreign investors, and to curtail inefficient risks associated with agency costs, risk aversion, asymmetric information, and time inconsistency problems that uneconomically increase the cost of imported capital in host countries. It draws on the economic analysis to explain central features of IIAs and their evolution over time, and to address various controversial issues in international investment litigation.

Exigent circumstances can extinguish or suspend a wide range of legal obligations. They may empower governments to seize property or quarantine individuals. They may excuse the nonperformance of private or public contractual obligations. And, of especial interest here, they may permit governments to deviate from their obligations under treaties or customary international law (CIL).

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea demonstrates plausible economic logic by assigning jurisdiction over portions of the ocean to the states that value them the most and can regulate them most cheaply, while respecting other states΄ interests in navigation and additional uses of the seas. For the vast oceanic areas that no state can regulate, the Convention provides for an open access regime subject to simple rules, mostly self-enforcing, to limit conflict over resources.