Wolfgang Alschner, research fellow at the Centre for Trade and Economic integration (CTEI), and Dimitriy Skougarevskiy, PhD Candidate in International Economics at the Graduate Institute, have won the 2016 International Geneva Award for their article “The New Gold Standard? Empirically Situating the Trans-Pacific Partnership in the Investment Treaty Universe”. The members of the International Geneva Committee selected their article along with two other papers that convince by their strong interdisciplinary appeal and direct policy relevance for international organisations.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has been labelled a “new, high-standard trade agreement”. But just how “new” and “high” are the standards it sets? In their article (published in Journal of World Investment and Trade 17, no. 3 [2016]), the authors answer that question by combining traditional legal analysis with computational text comparisons situating the TPP in the universe of international investment agreements (IIAs). They find that the TPP investment chapter offers few truly novel features – 81% of its text is taken from prior American treaties. Compared to the majority of IIAs, however, the TPP goes beyond existing practice: it sets high levels of investment protection, explicitly safeguards host state sovereignty and establishes a sophisticated investment arbitration architecture. Nevertheless, the TPP is unlikely to revolutionise the IIA universe. Its innovations are open to circumvention given that older treaties remain in force.

Mr Alschner (PhD in International Law, 2015) and Mr Skougarevskiy (PhD Candidate in International Economics) focus their research on the computational analysis of international economic law. They co-founded the website Mapping BITs, which showcases their research results in an interactive manner and offers an empirical perspective on the international investment agreement universe.

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