Trade and Sustainable Development - Hercules Database
The Centre’s research line on trade and sustainable development focuses in particular on the many interactions between global, regional, national and local levels of governance in these areas.
The Centre currently has five sub-themes on which it focuses its research within this area.
A first sub-theme focuses on the multi-level relationship between political institutions, legal regimes and economic development. The Centre was granted significant funding by the Hercules Foundation to build a large interdisciplinary longitudinal Database with country-level data. The aim of the Database is to stimulate interdisciplinary research on the interactions between political, economic and legal developments. The Database integrates data from several distinct sources, including datasets developed by academic institutions, international intergovernmental and private organizations. The first version of the database contains 45 datasets and more than 4700 variables. The second version will be released in 2011 and will integrate more than 70 datasets. The Hercules Database is increasingly being used and valorized in research projects and project proposals. One of these projects, with focus on the quantitative analysis of globalisation and regionalisation processes, takes place in the context of a five-year research community on Globalisation, regionalisation and economic and social inequality (GRESI) funded by Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO).
A second sub-theme deals with the role of multinational enterprises in the field of development. The increasing presence of foreign direct investments (FDI) has disclosed the dangers of monopolies and the vulnerable position of small rural households on the one hand, but on the other hand, these investments can contribute to local development via transfer of technology, management, capital and the correction of market imperfections, often through vertical integration of input suppliers and producers. International trade and investment rules define the modalities and potential of these investments. In cooperation with LICOS and UCL the Centre examines, in particular, the impact that FDI liberalization has on human development.
A third sub-theme focuses on the phenomenon of private standard-setting and in particular corporate social responsibility (CSR) and certification. This line of research aims to analyze the impact of private standards and assess their legal status and relationship with public standards, in particular in the context of the law and policies of the World Trade Organization. In this connection, the contribution of global private regulation to the emergence of an inter-national rule of law is being researched. Publication of an international edited volume on Private Standards and Global Governance is foreseen with Edward Elgar in 2011. Additionally, this research line also seeks to investigate how standard-setting (both private and public) relates to broader processes of so-called ‘informal international public policy-making’ (i.e. regulation through informal schemes and standards enacted in the framework of international organizations and regulatory networks), and how these processes of international law-making can be made more accountable. The Centre conducts an important research project on this topic, funded by the Hague Institute for the Internationalisation of the Law (HiiL), together with the Graduate Institute in Geneva and the University of Twente.
A fourth sub-theme concerns the environmental aspects of sustainable development. Apart from research on the post-2012 global climate change regime (section 4.1) and on the role of the EU in the coming about thereof (section 4.5), the Centre conducts policy research and gives advice on biodiversity, marine environmental policy and clean development, often from a comparative perspective, in particular comparing EU policies with the strategies of other major players such as the United States and China. In this context the Centre has successfully concluded a research project in cooperation with the University of California at Berkeley and LICOS on biosafety and biodiversity with the publication of two books. In the context of its InBev-Baillet Latour EU-China Chair, the Centre has moreover initiated two new climate-related research projects within this area, projects involving Vietnam and China (section 5).
A fifth sub-theme deals with global economic governance, in particular the international trade regime of the WTO and its interactions with EU and domestic laws and policies. Under this heading, Dominic Coppens successfully defended his PhD thesis Balancing Policy Space and Policy Constraints? A Critical Legal Analysis of WTO Disciplines on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures, which will be published with Cambridge University Press. Dominic, who obtained a postdoctoral grant from the University’s Research Fund, spent the Autumn of 2010 as Research Scholar at Columbia Law School. Under this sub-theme, an edited volume on China in the WTO based on the 2009 expert seminar series (section 7.1) is also being prepared.
