Export Restrictions on Critical Minerals and Metals: Testing the Adequacy of WTO Disciplines

Description

Conventional wisdom on the insufficiency of existing WTO disciplines on export restrictions has triggered momentum on the issue. In this book, Ilaria Espa offers a comprehensive analysis of the scope and coverage of WTO disciplines on export restrictions in light of emerging case law. She investigates whether such rules still provide a sufficient, credible and effective framework capable of preventing abuses in the use of export restrictive measures on critical minerals and metals during a period of economic crisis and change in international trade patterns. Giving a broad overview of the export restrictions applied to these materials, Espa identifies distinctive features in the proliferation of export barriers and analyses the existing WTO rules to reveal their scope, gaps and inconsistencies. She goes on to present solutions based upon her findings with the aim of bringing more coherence and equity to WTO rules on the export side.

Ilaria Espa is a Marie Curie Senior Research Fellow at the World Trade Institute (WTI), University of Bern, and a member of the Work Package on 'Trade and Climate Change' of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research programme in Trade Regulation. She was a visiting scholar at Columbia Law School, and she has served as a consultant for the Trade and Environment Division of the WTO and for the Swiss Federal Office of Energy.

'In conclusion, academics, students, and practitioners should consider this contribution as an excellent overview of the topic of export restrictions that is not limited to a presentation of the current disciplines, but that also offers an insight into the future by explaining how these disciplines might develop. Recent developments, such as the third export restriction complaint brought against China in the WTO, and the imposition of export duties on scrap metals by Ukraine constitute evidence of the continuing relevance of this fascinating topic.' Dyland Geraets, World Trade Review