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This draft article is forthcoming in the Journal of World Investment & Trade. The article examines the historical experience with and understanding of plurilateral trade agreements throughout the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and World Trade Organization (WTO) to better contextualise assessments of the continued viability of the single undertaking and the recent resurgence of plurilateralism in international trade law. Plurilateral agreements have been playing a significant role in international trade relations for the past fifty years. As such, the current wave of plurilateral agreements does not represent a seachange in approach to trade liberalisation, but rather a continuation of a process that originated many decades ago. Further, while the WTO agreements are multilateral in thatthey apply to all members, they can also l be seen as plurilateral in that not all WTO members have identical responsibilities under such agreements. The article concludes that plurilateralism and multilateralism have much in common, and hence may be mutually supportive rather than binary choices.

This chapter explores the concept of the prisoner’s dilemma in the context of compliance with international law. It examines the prisoner’s dilemma in a variety of international law contexts, from which international law can be seen as explanandum in that a prisoner’s dilemma sometimes leads to the creation of international law. International law can also serve as explanans in the context of the prisoner’s dilemma, in that international law has consequences and effects for prisoner’s dilemmas while not always resolving them. The chapter also identifies some limitations of the prisoner’s dilemma, in particular by highlighting examples of political economy factors that confound the assumptions inherent to a prisoner’s dilemma analysis.

This draft chapter examines the embedded liberalism compromise in the context of the GATT and Uruguay Round agreements. It also briefly addresses possible examples of embedded liberalism in the current international economic law environment. The term “embedded liberalism” was coined by John Gerard Ruggie in his seminal 1982 article, “International Regimes, Transactions and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order.” Ruggie revisits his phrase in later work, and others have also adopted the “embedded liberalism” concept, sometimes in ways that may not match Ruggie’s conception. Part I of the chapter discusses the concept as expressed by Ruggie in his original article. The question then arises whether the “embedded liberalism compromise” continued beyond the time period Ruggie discusses, and if so in what form or forms. This necessitates consideration of whether we should view the embedded liberalism compromise as having a fixed meaning based on Ruggie’s original concept, or whether we should instead see the possibility for a variety of iterations of embedded liberalism compromises, depending on the social, economic and political concerns of a given time. These issues are addressed in Part II. Part III considers whether a range of GATT and Uruguay Round Agreement provisions fit within Ruggie’s conception of embedded liberalism, and if not, whether they should nonetheless be considered to be new forms of an embedded liberalism compromise or whether they should be viewed as something other than embedded liberalism. Part IV considers embedded liberalism in the present-day context and Part V concludes.

During the first twenty years of the World Trade Organization’s history, the multilateral trading system has increasingly been accompanied by (1) free trade agreements (FTAs) and (2) preferential trade arrangements (PTAs). Such agreements have proliferated steadily, with several hundred having been notified to the WTO as of early 2016. However, there have been some significant changes in the types of trade agreements being negotiated outside the WTO in recent years. Since 2010, there has been a continued proliferation of “traditional” FTAs, but there have also been notable new developments. These include: an increase in multi-party FTAs; an increase in FTAs featuring more than one major economy; FTA coverage extending beyond the scope of the WTO Agreements; and subject-specific plurilateral negotiations being conducted outside the WTO negotiating structure. This chapter documents the rapid ascendancy of mega-FTAs and plurilateral trade agreements and explores the implications of these larger, more complicated and arguably more powerful trade agreements, with an emphasis on the Asia-Pacific region.

Introduction The ASEAN–Australia–New Zealand FTA (AANZFTA) combines two different pre-existing country groupings of long-standing. The first of these is ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which was founded in 1967 by Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. This grouping has expanded over the years, with Brunei Darussalam joining in 1984, followed by Vietnam in 1995, Laos and Myanmar in 1997, and Cambodia in 1999. While ASEAN has existed for nearly 50 years, for most of that period it has served as an alliance based on economic and political cooperation rather than as a free trade agreement. However, the original members of ASEAN launched a free trade initiative, the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA), in 1992. In 2003, after the expansion of ASEAN to its current membership, ASEAN announced plans to create an ASEAN Community comprising three pillars, one of which would be a free trade agreement to be called the ASEAN Economic Community. In 2007, this intention was memorialized in writing with a timetable to form the Community by 2015. The other pre-existing alliance was that between Australia and New Zealand, which have a long history of formal trade agreements. In 1965, close in time to the creation of ASEAN, these Oceania neighbours formed a free trade agreement known as the New Zealand–Australia Free Trade Agreement. This FTA was eclipsed in 1983 by the highly ambitious Australia–New Zealand Closer Economic Relations Trade Agreement (ANZCERTA), most commonly referred to as Closer Economic Relations (CER). Given the linkages already in place between the ASEAN countries on the one hand, and Australia and New Zealand on the other, the primary trade gains to be had pursuant to AANZFTA lie in new linkages between Australia and New Zealand and specific ASEAN members. Indeed, pursuant to an exchange of letters bearing treaty status, Australia and New Zealand have agreed that AANZFTA obligations only apply between them to a limited extent, including the tariff and Rules of Origin (ROO) commitments and the General Exceptions chapter. Following several years of negotiations, these two groupings formed the ASEAN–Australia–New Zealand Free Trade Agreement (AANZFTA), which came into force on 1 January 2010 for most of its participants. AANZFTA has been in effect for all participants since January 2012.

At midnight of 10 December 2019, the WTO Appellate Body ceased to be operational, as the US has been vetoing since May 2016 the selection of the members of the World Trade Court. The WTO dispute settlement system hence risks paralysis - a scenario occurring in case the losing party of a panel report appeals the latter “into the void,” i.e. before an Appellate Body with less than three judges. In response to this event, the European Union is developing an articulated approach to guarantee a rules-based international trade system and the principle of cooperation as the pillars of the governance of the global economy. One element of the EU approach is an initiative for an interim appeal arbitration procedure based on Article 25 of the DSU. The present work is devoted to the analysis of such a contingency measure, which may represent a bridge between the renovation of the existing multilateral dispute settlement mechanism and the innovation of a new two-level international judgment mechanism for settling trade controversies.