The New Gold Standard? Empirically Situating the Trans-Pacific Partnership in the Investment Treaty Universe

Article by Wolfgang Alschner and Dmitriy Skougarevskiy in the Journal of World Investment and Trade 17 (2016) pp339-373:

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? To answer that question we combine traditional legal analysis with computational text comparisons situating the TPP in the universe of international investment agreements (IIAs). We 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 revolutionize the IIA universe. Its innovations are open to circumvention given that older treaties remain in force.