Process matters: South Africa's experience exiting its BITs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines South Africa's policy decision to review and exit its Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs). Drawing on interviews with government officials and business representatives, public documents and secondary literature, it scrutinises the process that South Africa went through in reviewing its investment policies, its decision to terminate its BITs and to enact new domestic legislation for investor protection. The paper illustrates that the decision of the South African government to change its policies on investment was triggered by a concern that BITs and the international system of investor-state arbitration inhibits the ability of governments to enact legislation and regulatory measures aimed at promoting public policy objectives. While the review undertaken by South Africa may have its shortcomings, which the paper highlights, it has been lauded as a thorough and critical approach through which it has sought to build its internal capacity on the topic of investment. Documenting this fascinating process provides valuable insights into the drivers of investment policy reform and useful lessons for other developing counties who may wish to embark on a similar exercise.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.021 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".