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The authors argue that a WTO Investment Facilitation for Development Agreement needs a strong responsible business conduct provision, as such a provision helps to increase the contribution that FDI can make to sustainable development. They suggest some elements of such a provision.

Despite extensive arbitral practice interpreting investment treaty protections, serious shortcomings still exist particularly regarding the fair-and-equitable-treatment clause. Recent reforms do not always enhance legal certainty and protect countries' right to regulate. While there is little appetite for a multilateral reform initiative, this Perspective argues that that may soon be inevitable.

he number of international agreements purporting to liberalise trade, mainly focused on reducing protectionist measures through the imposition of general principles, has increased greatly over the last 25 years. More recently, the United States and the European Union (EU) concluded comprehensive agreements covering trade in goods, trade in services, and foreign investment. This article inquires whether, and the extent to which, such agreements represent a departure from previous practice. It focuses on (a) the instruments employed to address domestic regulation affecting trade in services and (b) three specific agreements concluded between 2016 and 2018: the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. While these recent Preferential Trade Agreements put forward novel approaches to regulatory diversity affecting trade in services, it is too early to ascertain whether these will have any ground-breaking impact in terms of services trade liberalisation.

This paper critiques a Panel ruling that was permissive in allowing the EU to exclude China from the renegotiations of several tariff lines of poultry meat and the related allocation of new tariff-rate quotas. The EU’s basis for exclusion was that China lacked a principal or substantial supplying interest in the modified tariff lines. The Panel’s ruling supported China for only two tariff lines in which China eventually served 50 percent of the EU market after certain SPS measures expired, on the narrow basis that this import increase should have been considered a special factor in the TRQ allocation. The paper argues that the Panel ruled too narrowly by disregarding China’s broader claims for a principal or substantial supplying interest. An interpretation consistent with the object and purpose of the GATT supports utilizing a broader set of evidence in China’s claim as a principal or substantial supplier for renegotiations of tariff schedules. Allowing nations to use tariff-rate quotas to prevent emerging markets from achieving a substantial supplying interest is a significant obstacle to the WTO’s purpose. The Panel’s ruling will be important for future tariff-rate quota renegotiations, such as those that would be necessary under Brexit.

The paper assesses the definition of indirect expropriation included in the recent EU proposal within the context of the TTIP negotiation. The paper argues that, while the EU proposal is likely to have narrowed the scope of the concept of indirect expropriation, in terms of providing ‘greater clarity’, we are not there yet. Like similar attempts before it, the EU proposal refers to a variety of different legal approaches without sufficiently clarifying their content and relationship. While this lack of clarity emphasizes the indecision among policy makers, including the EU, about where to draw the line between an indirect expropriation and a legitimate regulatory measure, it ultimately suggests that there are still doubts about the proper function of international investment law.