Chapter Two identifies the current legal and regulatory arrangements related to China’s electricity sector by examining the institutions and governing authority, pricing and tariff regulations, and investment approval. These regulatory aspects often determine the market features and characteristics of an electricity system. This chapter provides the foundation for understanding the design of critical supporting mechanisms adopted by the Renewable Energy Law and their implementation, which are discussed in the subsequent chapter.

Chapter 7 delves into the reformers often-futile attempts to solicit potential non-official allies such as the Lancashire textile manufacturers and Anglo-Indian planters who sought access to raw cotton and land freeholds. While it initially seemed that the mobilization of the mill owners might deter arbitrary colonial governance, they failed to back the reformers’ radical efforts to alter India’s bureaucratic apparatus after the Uprising of 1857. Disappointed on a second front, reformers were also compelled to condemn the European planters whose exploitative tactics resulted in agrarian disturbances. As Manchester cotton lords in the 1870s continued to harp on the inequity of the colonial import duties levied on their textiles, reformers accused them of weaponizing free trade and stifling Indian competition. Recurrent famines also brought the efficacy of laissez-faire governance into question, which in turn led a faction within the East India Association to espouse a racialized variant of conservationism.

At the heart of the multilateral trading system is the commitment to nondiscrimination, the most-favored-nation (MFN) principle, mandating that all nations participate on equal terms. Added to this are a series of obligations to limit government interventions in trade. To give assurance that the system will deliver what it promises, transparency is required, making clear to all the measures that affect trade. Reality diverges from the ideal.

In the decades before the First World War, Europeans developed new institutions and information networks to try to understand and manage a rapidly changing world economy. This was a diffuse organizational web without a clear institutional centre, but it was grounded in an increasingly standardized and professionalized set of treaty practices. This chapter traces Lucien Coquet, Hubert Llewellyn Smith, Bernhard Harms, and Richard Riedl as they began to build careers in a globalizing economy that was marked by sharp social and political tensions.

The United States was one of the world’s first modern nations and one of the first to break free from colonial rule. It therefore stands at the beginning of the history of economic nationalism. This chapter analyses how nationalist thinking on the economy evolved in the USA from the Revolution to the Civil War. During this era, nationalists shifted from an outward-focused system aiming for economic development to an inward-focussed system based on protection. Developmental ideas were first championed by Alexander Hamilton, but his elitist conception of economic policy did not sit easily with the democratising ethos of the new nation. Economic nationalism became a mass movement as intellectuals like Daniel Raymond, politicians such as Henry Clay and activists in the mould of Mathew Carey jostled over questions of trade, manufacturing and banking. Instead of Hamilton’s close relationship between government and capitalists, the new movement put the everyday American producer at the centre. As it did so, isolationist ideas came to dominate. The intellectual capstone of this strand was provided by Henry Carey, whose influence would entrench a distinctly protectionist ‘American System’.

This Chapter examines the ongoing challenges of using regulation to manage plastic pollution. Specifically, the Chapter identifies the problem of ’thin law’ where laws exist that do not directly address the problem at hand or when they do address the problem at hand are engulfed in exceptions that allow for operations to continue according to the existing status quo. The Chapter highlights several examples of ’thin law’ that are incapable of addressing the scale of plastic pollution. The Chapter proposes the need for ’thick law’ intervention in the form of a regional or global waste tariff on single-use plastics and plastic fishing gear designed to reduce production of new plastics and increase reuse.

Chapter 1 provides a general overview of Qing fiscal policy, focusing on major changes in the early eighteenth and later nineteenth century. After an attempt to reform the agricultural tax apparatus in the early eighteenth century lost steam amid accusations of “snatching profit from the people,” the central government made no further attempts to modify it until the mid-nineteenth century. In the meantime, nonagricultural taxes grew, but remained comparatively insignificant in total volume. As the economy grew, formal government revenue as a share of total economic output plunged from around 4 percent to barely 1 percent prior to the Opium War. Following a wave of mid-century political and financial crises, the government finally swung into action, implementing a number of major fiscal reforms, most notably the creation of a new commercial tax. The agricultural tax, however, remained stagnant at eighteenth century levels until the early twentieth century, when the Qing state was on the verge of total collapse. This stagnation had particularly crippling consequences for the Qing’s industrialization drive in the later nineteenth century.

The dispute over the Tariff of 1828 marked a turning point for interposition. State legislatures passed resolutions declaring protective tariffs unconstitutional, increasingly using more threatening language that echoed the doctrine of nullification John C. Calhoun advanced in the South Carolina Exposition of 1828. Calhoun’s arguments distorted Madison’s views and transformed traditional sounding the alarm interposition into an option for each state to nullify acts of the national government that it considered unconstitutional. Nullification prompted a national discussion about the nature of the Union, notably in the Webster–Hayne debate in the United States Senate in 1830. Nullifiers quoted the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions and Madison’s Report of 1800 to justify their constitutional theory, but misunderstood Madison’s theoretical right of the people to interpose in the final resort and overlooked the sounding the alarm interposition of the resolutions. Madison rejected both nullification and secession and tried to explain what he meant by a complex federalism based on divided sovereignty, ultimately failing to correct misconceptions about his resolutions.

The chapter looks at Churchill’s economic ideas as a Liberal and then Conservative and their impact on his actions. Churchill was a free trader and accepted the self-correcting specie-flow mechanism of the Gold Standard. His political economy before 1914 rested on interventions to remove monopoly power and market imperfections that would allow ‘competitive selection’ by free enterprise and encourage individual responsibility. After the war, strains appeared in this coherent set of assumptions. Churchill’s tenure as chancellor was marked by creative accounting for pragmatic political reasons. He remained a devotee of sound finance and balanced budgets, and despite some reservations on the issue of the return of the Gold Standard, he could not go against the advice of Treasury officials and the Bank of England, or his own ‘deeply internalized convictions’ that coincided with their assumptions. After 1929 he took little systematic interest in economics. Churchill’s coherent political economy of free trade and the Gold Standard collapsed and he had nothing in its place.

What is the relationship between the global economy and international law? In this chapter, we examine instruments that reflect the liberalism that has prevailed in international trading relations for the last half-century.  The resulting instruments include the articles of the World Trade Organization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, and the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Agreement. We also highlight anti-corruption instruments and various non-governmental organizations that also share the goals and processes of international liberalism.   The middle section examines attempts to combat the various and increasingly sophisticated forms of corruption in international business transactions, especially the explosion of difficult-to-combat cyber fraud.  The latter part of the chapter notes a growing trend towards economic nationalist goals, and anti-competitive behavior among state and business elites.

Chapter 4 explores the utility of different WTO rules in disciplining market-distortive behaviour of SOEs and subsidies, including GATT rules on import monopolies, state trading enterprises (STEs), transparency, and anti-dumping (AD) measures. In our view, these rules are all of limited utilities, albeit for different reasons: the rules on import monopolies and STEs are quite narrow in terms of the coverage of policy instruments and the prescribed obligations, the transparency obligation is rather tooth-less, while the ability to use AD measures to deal with market distortions due to state intervention has been curtailed by the Appellate Body (AB) in recent cases.

Liberia’s declaration of independence in 1847 was motivated in part by the Liberian government’s dependence on revenue from trade. Previous histories of Liberia have argued that there was a dramatic shift from protectionist policies in the nineteenth century to a policy of "open door" from the interwar period onward. This conclusion was based on the restriction of foreign trade to specific ports through so-called ports of entry laws dating back to the 1830s, and not abolished until 1931. There were also active debates among the Liberian elite about how protectionist Liberia should be in contemporary political discourse. This chapter uses new data on Liberian tariff rates to compare its trade policy to that of countries in Latin America and Asia. It finds that Liberia’s tariffs were somewhere between the protectionism of Latin America and the free trade policies of Asia, but closer to the latter. Despite rhetoric about the "closed door," trade was too important to the incomes of Liberian elites to restrict it.

This chapter tests my argument that the more democracies used labor repression to weaken union opposition, the more they moved toward free trade. It uses quantitative data on tariffs, democracy, and respect for labor rights from 126 developing countries from 1985 to 2010.

The main reason for the long-lasting popularity of Lego bricks is their versatility. A back-of-the-envelope calculation will reveal that six bricks of 2 x 4 studs can be combined in almost 1 billion ways. And because Lego bricks made today still interlock with those first made in 1958, the year the toy was first patented, the possibilities for creative play are, quite literally, innumerable.

Two years before the patent that would turn Lego into the world’s favourite toy company, a man called Malcom McLean made the same discovery as Ole Kirk Christiansen, the inventor of Lego. McLean was not in the business of making children’s toys, however, but of shipping goods. On 26 April 1956 he was watching his idea come to fruition: in Newark, New Jersey, a crane was lifting fifty-eight aluminium metal boxes into an old tanker ship.

This chapter describes the moral and psychological ‘dilemmas’ of politicians, legal practitioners (like WTO lawyers, investment arbitrators) and businesses, driven all too often by self-interested utility maximization rather than by ‘inclusive, public reason’ accepting moral responsibility for reconciling all public and private interests on the basis of mutually agreed ‘principles of justice’ and human rights. It further illustrates these dilemmas by the US Trump administration’s neo-liberal, business-driven assault on UN and WTO law. It argues that power-politics and interest-group-politics underlying both neo-liberal and state-capitalist regulatory approaches undermine protection of human rights in IEL. It further describes the pragmatic ‘judicial common law approaches’ in WTO jurisprudence and investment adjudication, which focus on governmental rights to protect PGs (like public health, indigenous peoples’ rights, public morality, public order) and on agreed ‘constitutional principles of justice’ rather than on human rights. It concludes that Europe’s multilevel constitutionalism has better succeeded in ‘constitutionalizing’ common market law, the European Union’s (EU) external relations law and economic adjudication by protecting civil, political, economic and social rights within a ‘social market economy’ (article 3 of the Treaty on European Union [TEU]) embedded into ‘multilevel democratic constitutionalism’ and multilevel human rights law and adjudication.