Outside the conventional scope of national security, States characterize a plethora of issues as security concerns in present-day international affairs. While the securitization of unconventional issues has been studied extensively in relation to national security exceptions under economic treaties, States’ use of unconventional security claims in invoking public policy exceptions, where the legal text contains no security-related terms, has attracted less academic attention. This article investigates the WTO judiciary’s approach to unconventional security claims raised under the GATT/GATS general exceptions, focusing on energy security as a case study. It demonstrates how the WTO judiciary has used two ‘old’ legal techniques from well-established general exceptions jurisprudence to examine ‘new’ energy security claims: framing regulatory objectives and identifying origin-based discriminations. The article finds that the WTO judiciary tends to be more permissive with energy security claims that are more closely related to the conventional, defence-oriented security notion; claims that are more distant from the conventional conception are also given substantial regard, but subject to more cautious scrutiny.

Drawing on unbalanced panel data with a maximum of 271,656 bilateral trade flow observations from 1996 to 2021, this study investigates both the linear and nonlinear influence of national Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance gaps on green exports. When the ESG performance of the exporting country exceeds that of the destination country, the results indicate that an increase in the ESG gap significantly stimulates green exports, and there is evidence that this stimulating effect is achieved by widening green innovation gaps. However, the marginal effect diminishes as environmental regulations in the destination country become more stringent. Conversely, when the exporting country’s ESG performance is lower, narrowing the ESG gap leads to an N-shaped relationship with green exports, which remains U-shaped after removing the extremes. This research provides empirical evidence and policy implications for the trade effects of ESG performance from a macro perspective, while supporting the rationality and necessity of the ESG concept.

Theory supports two opposing trajectories regarding the effects of trade provisions on micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) and on their integration into the global value chain (GVC). On the one hand, provisions such as increased competitiveness, networking support, and cooperation provisions enhance firms’ GVC participation. On the other hand, provisions that establish common standards and regulations that increase compliance costs can be burdensome for small enterprises. This paper examines the effect of such MSME-related provisions on participation in GVCs. By merging the World Trade Organization trade agreements and the World Bank Enterprise Surveys datasets, we contribute to the literature in two ways. First, we distinguish between trade-related and non-trade-related provisions. Second, we scrutinize the heterogeneity across sectors, income levels, and regions. Our results show a particularly positive effect of MSME-related provisions, with a larger effect of non-trade-related provisions compared with trade-related ones. In addition, this effect is particularly relevant to low-technology-intensive sectors, low-income countries, and Asian economies. Our results remain consistent when using alternative variables, sample characteristics, and estimation methods.

This article considers whether Members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) can develop a collective response to a globally welfare-damaging situation that impacts individual Members differentially. We conclude that collective action remains within the letter and spirit of the WTO Agreements. We set out the enabling procedures for collective action in a WTO dispute setting, in particular, the use of the rarely used situation complaint. We were motivated by the United States’ move to redraw its trade relations and break from its international trade commitments through bilateral negotiations in which it holds asymmetric leverage, buttressed by a pre-emptive announced escalation in response to any attempt by counterparties to join in forging a collective response. We conclude that, if undertaken, collective action can raise each Member’s voice into a countervailing choir and, more importantly, it can reinforce the mutual benefits derived from the multilateral trading system. Collective action thus serves a double purpose in engaging domestic concerns and the collective interests of those intending to preserve the multilateral system on which each Member depends.

This study investigates the effect of participation in the Global Value Chain (GVC) on Multidimensional Energy Poverty (MEPI), and the role played by the quality of institutions (QI) in the short and long run for 51 African countries over the period 1995–2018. For this purpose, the DCCE-PMG approach is employed, as well as both the GVC and QI indices. MEPI includes electricity, clean fuel, and technology for cooking. The findings show that GVC participation negatively affects MEPI in both the short and long run, meaning that the GVC reduces energy poverty in Africa. Besides, there is mixed evidence regarding the heterogeneity effect according to rural and urban locations. The evidence further shows that GVCs interact with institutions to negatively impact both energy poverty and the rural–urban MEPI gap, implying that the better the institutional quality, the larger the effect of GVC integration on energy poverty reduction. Therefore, a better quality of institution enables local firms, participating in the GVC, to easily capture technology and knowledge diffusion to promote energy development and fulfill the spatial inequality in energy poverty. Additional tests allow us to confirm the evidence and, moving forward, the implications of participation in the GVC.

Like many newer EU Free Trade Agreements, the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) includes commitments concerning labour and social standards and environment and climate policy under the title the ‘Level Playing Field’. This title includes non-regression provisions, which prohibit reducing or weakening certain standards ‘in a manner affecting trade’, and novel rebalancing provisions, which allow the parties to take unilateral measures if material impacts on trade are arising as a result of significant divergences in levels of protection in specific areas of regulation. Although terminology linking trade to labour and environmental issues is becoming reasonably common in trade agreements, there has only been limited consideration as to what trade effects or impacts actually need to be demonstrated. This paper argues that the language of ‘manner affecting trade’ and ‘material impact on trade’ in the TCA denotes a ‘conditions of competition’ test as opposed to a stricter, and relatively more difficult to satisfy, trade remedies model. It further considers the possible application of the provisions in the context of the UK’s 2022 strikes measures, highlighting that even if a conditions of competition test is used, there are serious questions as to whether the non-regression and rebalancing provisions in the TCA are efficacious in achieving values-based objectives.

This paper contributes to the discussion on the link between international trade policy and food and nutrition security by looking at whether and how these concepts are addressed in Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs). We compile a dataset covering almost 600 PTAs that entered into force between 1948 and 2024, and apply textual analysis to show that the number of references to food security has increased over recent decades. To analyse the role of the WTO Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) in shaping the rules and practices of international food trade, we investigate the placement, function, and significance of food security provisions in four case studies, looking at the extent to which the regulatory approaches of these PTAs align with or diverge from the relevant provisions of the WTO AoA. Our study reveals that, despite the growing prominence of food security and nutrition in PTAs, their regulatory approaches largely align with the AoA and seldom overcome its shortcomings. While some agreements introduce broader and more contemporary understandings of food security, binding commitments remain limited and structural tensions between national and global objectives persist.

This article explores the global regulatory landscape for subsidies and countervailing measures, assessing its capacity to address challenges like climate change. While subsidies can effectively correct market failures and support public welfare, they also risk creating trade distortions and enabling protectionism. The analysis assesses the legacy of the Uruguay Round and the resulting Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures and finds that it does not sufficiently distinguish between socially beneficial and negative subsidies. Current rules often disregard the intent and actual impact of government support, resulting in inefficient remedies being applied against positive subsidies. Reviewing past reform efforts, the author presents the ‘renewed net subsidy’ approach – a pragmatic proposal that seeks to balance the flexibility needed for legitimate policy goals with safeguards against trade-distorting actions, aiming to foster more nuanced, cooperative governance of subsidies within the international trading system.

What factors shape public opinion toward international law? Current research suggests that citizens respond strongly to negative cues, but have found limited effects for information about the potential benefits. We theorize that cues about the reciprocity of international law – that the parties face mutually enforceable obligations – can increase support. We evaluate our theory with a survey experiment in the United States (US) examining views towards Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), a frequently used but controversial dispute settlement mechanism in international investment law. Two findings stand out. First, consistent with previous research, the public is more supportive of international law if their country is the initiator rather than the target of a dispute. Second, when their country is the target, information about the use of ISDS by US firms, which we refer to as specific reciprocity, appears to increase support. More diffuse cues of reciprocity, however, do not affect support. Overall, our findings provide evidence that specific reciprocity cues can increase support for international law even when one’s country faces potential costs.

Investment facilitation is an increasingly important policy tool to promote foreign investment. However, we know very little about its prevalence. This paper introduces a new dataset for measuring the adoption of investment facilitation measures at country level. The Investment Facilitation Index (IFI) covers 101 measures, grouped into six policy areas, and maps adoption across 142 economies. The paper outlines the conceptual and methodological framework of the IFI, analyses the current levels of adoption, and demonstrates the index’s robustness. The data show that economies with lower adoption rates typically belong to the low-income or lower-middle-income groups, often located in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. This dataset serves as a benchmark for assessing the design and impact of international agreements, such as the Investment Facilitation for Development Agreement (IFDA). It can also support the IFDA implementation by guiding domestic assessments of technical assistance needs and capacity development.

Are people who are more knowledgeable and interested in trade policy more likely to change their preferences regarding trade agreements compared to their less knowledgeable and less interested counterparts on receiving new information from politicians? This study responds to this question by developing a framework that distinguishes knowledge from interest and assesses it using an original survey conducted on voters during the 2020 US election campaign. Assessing whether information about trade agreements provided by political elites shifts individuals’ trade preferences and whether knowledge and interest condition susceptibility to such information reveals that people knowledgeable and interested in trade policy are less likely to change their original preference. Together, the results sharpen the existing theories by establishing knowledge and interest as moderators of trade opinion change in low-salience trade settings.

The purpose of this study is to reveal the impact of pilot free trade zones (PFTZs) on local governance quality (LGQ) to provide a reference for driving governance reforms in China. Based on provincial panel data from 2004 to 2020 in China, the impact of the establishment of PFTZs on LGQ is analyzed by employing the multi-period difference-in-difference (DID) method. The results show that the establishment of PFTZs can significantly enhance the governance quality of local governments, but there is heterogeneity in location and establishment batches. PFTZs improve LGQ through the effects of institutional spillover, factor allocation, and talent agglomeration. FDI spillover can partially substitute for promoting the effect of PFTZs on LGQ, and economic growth pressures can distort the positive effect of PFTZs on LGQ. Therefore, policymakers should clarify the functional positioning of PFTZs and leverage their effects, which are institutional spillover, factor allocation, and high-end factor agglomeration, to enhance LGQ.

This paper introduces the Granular Trade and Production Activities (GRANTPA) database, which covers international trade flows for 3,124 products and 247 countries over the period 1995–2019 as well as domestic trade flows and production data for the same number of products and years for a subset of 35 European economies. The original data sources that we employ are Eurostat’s Comext and Prodcom databases. A gravity application delivers a large set of product-level ‘home bias’ estimates, which cannot be obtained without domestic trade flows. The average estimates on the standard gravity variables in our model (e.g., distance) are comparable to those from the related literature. However, our disaggregated estimates are very heterogeneous across products, thus highlighting the importance of our new database.

This article examines how critical minerals (CM) supply security has been absorbed into the evolving concept of national security underpinning foreign investment screening (FIS), using Australia’s treatment of Chinese CM investment as a case study. It argues that FIS now functions as a tool of strategic alignment through selective, opaque restrictions under the logic of friend-shoring. This shift raises structural tensions with Australia’s obligations under international investment agreements (IIAs). Through analysis of Australia’s FIS regime, its implementation shaped by a CM friend-shoring strategy, and potential conflicts with its IIAs with China, the article situates Australia within a broader global trend in which the expansion of FIS increasingly challenges the coherence of international investment law. It offers a novel conceptualization of FIS as a legal expression of the geoeconomic turn and proposes recommendations for reconciling strategic regulatory discretion with treaty-based commitments in an era of contested globalization.

This article examines the interpretative divergence in China – Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights, the first WTO dispute to address whether TRIPS obligations contain an implicit territorial limitation. The Panel adopted a strict territorial reading of Article 1.1, holding that TRIPS disciplines apply only to the implementation of minimum standards within a Member’s domestic legal system, and do not extend to measures where the effects are felt abroad. The Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement (MPIA) arbitrators reversed this approach, introducing a functional, effects-sensitive interpretation under which Members must implement TRIPS in a manner that does not frustrate the enforcement of intellectual property rights in other jurisdictions. The article argues that the Tribunal’s expanded interpretation is inconsistent with the text, structure, object and purpose, and negotiating history of the TRIPS Agreement. A close reading of Article 1.1 demonstrates that ‘give effect to’ refers to domestic legal operability rather than cross-border consequences. The systemic design of TRIPS, establishing a minimum-standards regime primarily concerned with the domestic implementation of intellectual property protection, further confirms that it does not impose transnational enforcement obligations. The article situates the WTO dispute, China – Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights within broader debates on the multilateral governance of intellectual property. While acknowledging that cross-border spillovers are increasingly common in global standard-essential patent (SEP) litigation, it maintains that such challenges are better addressed through institutional cooperation and private ordering than through judicial expansion of treaty obligations. The analysis clarifies the limits of WTO adjudication in the intellectual property (IP) domain and reaffirms territoriality as a foundational principle of the TRIPS regime.

To mitigate uncertainty, it is often assumed that governments negotiate ample flexibility provisions when entering new international treaties. Yet, the case of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) suggests that governments prioritize the more stringent commitments when faced with uncertainty. In this paper, we investigate the effects of uncertainty spikes occurring during negotiations on the design of 251 bilateral PTAs. Our theory proposes that sharp increases in uncertainty make governments more prone to signing deeper PTAs to emphasize their commitment to liberalization. In doing so, governments cater to firms’ demands for institutions protecting investment, upholding intellectual property rights, and promoting regulatory harmonization. We find robust evidence that PTAs are deeper when the contracting parties are faced with uncertainty spikes during negotiations. However, we do not find equally consistent evidence that countries also make PTAs more flexible. While much of the rational-design literature has focused on flexibility as a tool to cope with uncertainty, our findings suggest that countries rather tend to tighten their international commitments in turbulent times.

Why do some countries cooperate in international negotiations while others do not? This paper examines how regime type and trade relationships jointly shape cooperation among states. While prior research claims that democracies are inherently more cooperative and that trade fosters collaboration, we argue that neither factor alone sufficiently explains patterns of cooperation. Drawing on 1,567 documents submitted by World Trade Organization (WTO) members during the Doha Round negotiations (2000–2012), we analyse cooperation between country pairs (dyads) using hurdle models to assess both the likelihood and extent of cooperation. We find that democracies are not uniformly more cooperative but become so only when high levels of trade interdependence exist. Similarly, democracies also cooperate with authoritarian regimes when intensive trade relationships are present. These results challenge the assumption that democratic governance naturally generates cooperation, showing instead that economic incentives play a decisive role. The study advances understanding of international cooperation in complex multilateral negotiation settings.

A large body of literature examines the drivers of individual attitudes towards international trade policies. This article contributes to this literature by exploring the role of border regions across the European Union (EU). Border regions offer a unique context for examining trade attitudes. Residency in either EU, non-EU, or maritime borders generates differential impacts on individuals’ support for distinct trade policies. Focusing on attitudes towards import duties and EU trade agreements, this article demonstrates that individuals in non-EU borderlands and maritime border regions are particularly supportive of lowering import duties, whereas support for extra-EU trade agreements is largely uniform across regions, with only a modest positive tendency among maritime residents. Broader sentiment on trade shows limited regional differences, chiefly between EU-border and non-EU-border residents. Including a battery of control variables drawn from the literature, the article leverages individual-level data at the most fine-grained level available in the EU to explore these dynamics relying on several regression models. This article speaks to both the literature on trade attitudes and border studies by offering a conceptualization of borders that distinguishes between EU borders, non-EU borders, and maritime borders, each of which has distinct implications for individuals’ trade attitudes.

Trade concerns at World Trade Organization (WTO) Committees and Councils show the WTO’s involvement in addressing digital trade beyond treaty-making and dispute settlement cases. Observations from a database analysing relevant concerns foremost raised at the Committee on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) show an increasingly significant occurrence of trade concerns not corresponding to the idea of them being a vehicle for tension-defusing dialogue. Two relevant observations are the prominence among involved WTO members of China, the European Union, and the United States of America, and the contentiousness of raised issues, such as cybersecurity or artificial intelligence. Those observations highlight that concerns voiced about digital trade in technical WTO bodies, such as the TBT Committee, also are vehicles of members’ political commitment and confrontation. The article concludes by putting these findings in the perspective of the contribution that WTO bodies, like the TBT Committee, can make to address digital trade.

Governments increasingly view data as a strategic asset, providing curated datasets and computing resources to domestic firms as part of national industrial development. This shift raises a fundamental question: can the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (SCM Agreement), which was negotiated for tangible goods in a pre-digital era, accommodate state provision of data and computational capacity as subsidies in the twenty-first-century economy? This paper examines that question, not to argue for a definitive answer but to map the doctrinal pathway and identify key analytical steps, evidentiary requirements, and practical constraints. Rather than focusing narrowly on artificial intelligence, this analysis situates data provision within broader debates about WTO law’s technological neutrality, the evolving purpose of subsidy rules, and the resurgence of digital industrial policy. By tracing the function of data as a critical production input and analyzing specific state initiatives, this paper identifies key considerations for policymakers and adjudicators assessing the alignment of data infrastructure measures with SCM disciplines. The analysis reveals both the analytic promise of existing legal frameworks and their significant practical limitations.