Category: TRADE AND INVESTMENT RULES

How Global Trade Rules Put the World at Risk for Financial Crisis

By Rachel Thrasher In the wake of the 2008-09 Global Financial Crisis, there was a movement by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Group of 20 (G20) and many in the academic community to investigate how certain policies could help stabilize the world economy. A critical focal point for this was capital flow management measures, or […]

Open Source COVID-19 Vaccine Offers Potential Pathway for Vaccinating the World

By Rachel Thrasher Scientists from the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and Baylor College of Medicine have developed a new COVID-19 vaccine based on well-known, easy-to-use technology, cheap to produce and relatively easy to store. Drawing from just $7 million in investor funds over the past two years, Peter J. Hotez and Maria […]

National Climate Funds: A New Dataset on National Financing Vehicles for Climate Change

The Paris Agreement’s nationally driven structure places the spotlight on financing strategies at the national level. The role of national funding vehicles in mobilizing climate finance, however, has not received extensive attention. In a new journal article published in Climate Policy, Rishikesh Ram Bhandary remedies this gap by introducing a novel dataset of national climate […]

Webinar Summary: Using Debt-for-Climate Swaps to Solve Two Crises at Once

By Rebecca Ray On Thursday, January 13, the Boston University Global Development Policy (GDP) Center and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Development Centre hosted a webinar discussion on the potential for using debt-for-climate swaps as an innovative solution to the twin crises of climate change and debt distress. The discussion consisted of […]

Policy Space for Capital Flow Management: An Empirical Investigation

In the wake of the global financial crisis, economic research has shown that regulating cross-border financial flows helped prevent and mitigate financial crises. This research played a role in the political economy of the post-crisis governance architecture where the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Group of Twenty (G20) and other international bodies recommitted policy frameworks to […]

How the International Trade and Investment Regime Constrains Pandemic Policymaking – And What Global Leaders Can Do About It

By Rachel Thrasher As COVID-19 has taken millions of lives, governments around the globe have attempted to quickly mobilize and mitigate the health, social and economic impacts of the pandemic. Pandemic-responsive policy interventions ranging from subsidies to trade restrictions, and investment measures to government procurement initiatives, have taken precedence over traditional policy preferences that would […]

Policy Responses to COVID-19: Lessons for the Global Trade and Investment Regime

As COVID-19 has taken millions of lives around the globe, governments everywhere have attempted to quickly mobilize to mitigate the health, social and economic impacts of the pandemic. COVID-responsive policy interventions ranging from subsidies to trade restrictions, and investment measures to government procurement initiatives, have taken precedence over traditional policy preferences that would favor market-oriented […]

Top of COP: Outcomes for Development Finance and Global Economic Governance

By Rishikesh Ram Bhandary and Katie Gallogly-Swan Amid a flurry of high-level plurilateral commitments and late-night negotiations, the Glasgow Climate Pact of the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) was agreed on Saturday, November 13 with the drop of the gavel. Additional pledges and commitments put global warming on track to reach between a […]

Constraining Development in International Trade: Q&A with Rachel Thrasher

By Samantha Igo In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and growing climate crisis, it is becoming increasingly apparent that there is an unresolved tension between the network of rules that make up the global trading system, and the needs of that system’s individual countries. The new book by Rachel Thrasher, Constraining Development: the Shrinking Policy […]