Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are transforming economies, societies, and geopolitics. Enabled by the exponential increase of data that is collected, transmitted, and processed transnationally, these changes have important implications for international economic law (IEL). This volume examines the dynamic interplay between AI and IEL by addressing an array of critical new questions, including: How to conceptualize, categorize, and analyze AI for purposes of IEL? How is AI affecting established concepts and rubrics of IEL? Is there a need to reconfigure IEL, and if so, how? Contributors also respond to other cross-cutting issues, including digital inequality, data protection, algorithms and ethics, the regulation of AI-use cases (autonomous vehicles), and systemic shifts in e-commerce (digital trade) and industrial production (fourth industrial revolution). This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This monograph has two central purposes. The first is to provide a critical analysis of how governmental, private and hybrid product standards are regulated in the GATT/WTO legal framework. The second purpose is to explore – both positively and normatively – the impact that WTO disciplines may have on the composition, function and decision-making process of various standard-setting bodies through the lens of a series of selected case studies, including: the EU eco-labelling scheme; ISO standards; and private standards such as the FSC. The book analyses what role, if any, the WTO may play in making product standards applied in international trade embody not only technological superiority but also substantive and procedural fairness such as deliberation, representativeness, openness, transparency, due process and accountability. Whilst it has been long recognised that voluntary product standards drawn up by both governmental and non-governmental bodies can in practice create trade barriers as serious as mandatory governmental regulations, a rigorous and systematic inquiry into the boundary, relevance and impact of WTO disciplines on product standards is still lacking. Providing a lucid interpretation of the relevant WTO rules and cases on product standards, this book fills this significant gap in WTO law literature. Definitive and comprehensive, this is an essential reference work for scholars and practitioners alike.

Trade in services, far more than trade in goods, is affected by a variety of domestic regulations, ranging from qualification and licensing requirements in professional services to pro-competitive regulation in telecommunications services. Experience shows that the quality of regulation strongly influences the consequences of trade liberalization. WTO members have agreed that a central task in the ongoing services negotiations will be to develop a set of rules to ensure that domestic regulations support rather than impede trade liberalization. Since these rules are bound to have a profound impact on the evolution of policy, particularly in developing countries, it is important that they be conducive to economically rational policy-making. This book addresses two central questions: What impact can international trade rules on services have on the exercise of domestic regulatory sovereignty? And how can services negotiations be harnessed to promote and consolidate domestic policy reform across highly diverse sectors? The book, with contributions from several of the world's leading experts in the field, explores a range of rule-making challenges arising at this policy interface, in areas such as transparency, standards and the adoption of a necessity test for services trade. Contributions also provide an in-depth look at these issues in the key areas of accountancy, energy, finance, health, telecommunications and transportation services.

Papers presented at the second annual World Trade Forum Conference held in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, on August 28-29, 1998.

An exploration of the current state of global trade law in the era of Big Data and AI. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement covers international commerce in goods and services including measures that directly affect trade, such as import tariffs and quotas, and almost any type of internal measure with an impact on trade. Legal and Economic Principles of World Trade Law contributes to the analysis of the texts of World Trade Law in law and economics, reporting work done to identify improvements to the interpretation of the Agreement. It starts with background studies, the first summarizes The Genesis of the GATT, which highlights the negotiating history of the GATT 1947–8; the second introduces the economics of trade agreements. These are followed by two main studies. The first, authored by Bagwell, Staiger and Sykes, discusses legal and economic aspects of the GATT regulation of border policy instruments, such as import tariffs and import quotas. The second, written by Grossman, Horn and Mavroidis, focuses on the core provision for the regulation of domestic policy instruments - the National Treatment principles in Art. III GATT.