Fragmentation in international trade law: insights from the global investment regime
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract With World Trade Organization negotiations stagnant, and preferential trade agreements (PTAs) rapidly proliferating, international trade relations are shifting markedly toward bilateralism. The resulting fragmentation in the international trade regime poses serious risks to economic welfare and the coherence of international trade law. Similar challenges have been faced in the international investment regime, which is comprised of a highly fragmented network of bilateral investment treaties (BITs). However, scholars have identified several mechanisms that promote harmonization in the international investment regime. Among these are cross-treaty interpretation in dispute settlement and the inclusion of most-favoured nation (MFN) clauses in BITs. This paper assesses the scope for these two mechanisms to emerge in the international trade regime by comparing the legal framework, institutional dynamics, and political economy of the trade and investment regimes. The analysis suggests that cross-treaty interpretation is likely to emerge in the trade regime as PTA dispute settlement activity increases and that greater use of MFN clauses in PTAs is a viable possibility. These developments would mitigate the effects of fragmentation and advance harmonization in the international trade regime.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it