5.12.08

Trade disputes: asymmetry and policy mechanism

. . . is the topic of my latest Trade Tripper column in this Friday-Saturday issue of BusinessWorld. Excerpts:

"The analogy necessarily made with regard to the settlement of trade disputes rests on certain levels, whether it be on the formative, normative, or substantive sense. The toolbox analogy is commonly employed, particularly when defining the settlement of disputes as an allocation of certain rights between State parties to the dispute.

Nevertheless, the analogy, while presenting in a certain sense the diversity of available mechanisms within which such rights, liabilities, and obligations are to be recognized, all of which it must be considered still fall within the parameters and restrictions laid down by general conceptions of what we consider to be sovereignty in its internal and external sense."