Potential Conflicts between Investor Rights and Environmental Regulation under NAFTA's Chapter 11
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I. INTRODUCTION The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA),1 which entered into force January 1, 1994, among the United States, Canada, and Mexico, has among its objectives, eliminate barriers to trade in, and facilitate the cross border movement of, goods and services between the territories of the and to increase substantially investment opportunities in the territories of the Parties .2 While the objectives do not mention environmental considerations, in the Preamble the Parties resolve to. undertake each of the preceding [expanding trade, investment, etc.] in a manner consistent with environmental protection and conservation . NAFTA's complex provisions focus on the elimination of import duties and non-tariff barriers on trade in goods3 and services,4 and on protection of investment.5 NAFTA, however, also covers, inter alia, agriculture, standards, government procurement, intellectual property, and business travel.6 While in most instances the NAFTA provisions have been implemented without delay or controversy, disputes have arisen in several key trade related areas, most significandy with regard to the United States' refusal to implement provi sions providing for cross-border trucking services.7 Earlier, disputes over trade in dairy products (United States v. Canada), in broom corn brooms (Mexico v. United States) and with regard to cross-border trucking services and investment (Mexico v. United States), were the subject of panel decisions under the governmentto-government dispute settlement procedures.8 Numerous antidumping and countervailing duty unfair trade (unfair trade cases permitted under WTO rules) cases have been appealed to binational panels convened under Chapter 19.9 In the longer run, however, it may well be that the investment protection provisions of Chapter 11 of NAFTA will become the most significant in terms of conflicts between free trade and investment flows, and other governmental objectives, such as protection of the environment. Protection of investment is an integral part of NAFTA. As one of the negotiators has noted: Trade and investment flows are interdependent. To achieve the benefits of economic liberalization, investment barriers must be addressed as comprehensively as trade barriers. Hence, a chapter on investment was an essential element of an agreement that was to provide the basis for hemispheric free trade.10 Chapter 11 of NAFTA provides a comprehensive series of rights for investors of one NAFTA Party investing and doing business in the territory of another NAFTA Party.11 It provides investors, inter alia, with detailed and explicit protection against nationalization and expropriation, including actions tantamount to expropria tion, as well as national treatment or most-favored-nation treatment, a guarantee of fair and equitable treatment and full protection and security under international law for their investments, to the extent required under international law, protection against performance requirements, flexibility in selecting senior management and free transfers of funds.12 These provisions are reciprocal. It seems clear that Canadian restrictions on foreign investment, particularly its screening of large investments, were a U.S. concern doing the negotiations. The Chapter 11 provisions, however, probably reflected more than anything else the desire to encourage United States (and Canadian) investment in Mexico by providing foreign investors with a greater level of confidence against arbitrary and discriminatory host government action, including but not limited to expropriation,13 complementing NAFTA's market access measures and the trade liberalization policies Mexico began in 1985.14 Nevertheless, those who assumed that the bulk of investment disputes under NAFTA would be between U.S. or Canadian investors and the Mexican Government guessed wrong. While much of the NAFTA Chapter 11 language is similar to that found in numerous U. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".