Imperfect international treaties interpreted flexibly are likely to be better than no treaties

Effects of International Human Rights Treaties

Bilateral Investment Treaties and International Integration

This paper studies how bilateral investment treaties (BITs) affect the trade integration between partner countries. While the overall results from the full sample show that BIT signing is associated with an increase in overall imports that is generally smaller than the effect of WTO membership, BIT signing is found to have a considerable effect on capital goods imports and on imports of differe...

International treaties. Comprehensive test ban: the long road.

Watching the waves IMS also has a smaller network of sensors to listen for explosions carried out underwater, just above the ocean surface, or below the ocean bottom. Sound travels very efficiently in water: Kiyoshi Suyehiro of the Institute for Research on Earth Evolution in Kanagawa, Japan, says a 20-kilogram test charge of TNT was detected 16,000 kilometers away. As a result, IMS has just 11...

Climate treaties and approaching catastrophes

If the threshold that triggers climate catastrophe is known with certainty, and the benefits of avoiding catastrophe are high relative to the costs, treaties can easily coordinate countries’ behavior so as to avoid the threshold. Where the net benefits of avoiding catastrophe are lower, treaties typically fail to help countries cooperate to avoid catastrophe, sustaining only modest cuts in emis...

A BIT IS BETTER THAN A LOT Bilateral Investment Treaties and Preferential Trade Agreements

T landscape of the global economy is increasingly dotted with institutions that regulate investment and trade. The number of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) and preferential trade agreements (PTAs) stand out in this regard, with nearly every country a member of at least one of these institutions, if not many. Yet, for all the scholarly attention paid to investment treaties and trade agreem...