International Economic Law

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised salient questions about global intellectual property rights rules and their implementation at regional, sub-regional and national levels. These questions revolve around the tensions between private rights and the public interest. For example, how can governments employ flexibilities and other measures to facilitate access to pharmaceutical products including drugs, vaccines, test kits, personal protective equipment and related technologies? Or how can governments navigate the intersections of copyright and the right to education to promote access to educational materials for teaching and learning? Broader conceptual, practical, and institutional issues, foregrounded on fostering development-oriented intellectual property rights systems in the Global South, will be analysed from different perspectives.

The question of a regulatory framework for this type of CSR at the African Union level is paramount. Such regulatory frameworks could be meta-regulatory in nature and thus embrace a mix of soft law and hard law rules with incentives. This need for policy and regulation is recognised in the African Union Agenda 2063 framework document both in order to effectively finance development objectives and to enable full exploitation of the partnership capabilities in the interest of Africa. The African Union has also pursued this set goal for agribusiness as a result of the Malabo declaration on accelerated agricultural growth commitments

The circular economy concept is receiving an increasing amount of attention by academics, law-and policy-makers, and private stakeholders as an alternative economic model to realise a transition to a low-carbon, sustainable future. Drivers behind the circular economy concept’s popularity include growing public awareness of plastics waste and biodiversity impacts, increasing competitiveness for natural resources globally especially amongst the G20, and innovations in bio and digital technologies.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing vulnerabilities while creating new ones for many regions particularly in Africa, Latin America, the South Pacific and the Caribbean. COVID-19 as well as the trade wars among the major trading economies of the world that preceded it have threatened abandonment and disruption of the global trade and investment regime all the time while promising actual reform. This webinar which follows the conclusion of the four-part Symposium on COVID-19 and International Economic Law in the Global South, will explore these themes from a variety of perspectives.

This contribution starts with two observations, both reflecting mainstream approaches to international economic law, international institutional law and public international law more generally. First, international development law, defined as a branch of International Economic Law (IEL) that sets out “the rights and duties of states and other actors in the development process” seldom receives the same degree of research and teaching focus typically dedicated to branches such as international trade, investment and monetary regulation – as a cursory review of the tables of contents of prominent IEL textbooks and research handbooks illustrates. Second, the same can be said about multilateral development banks (MDBs) and their development-finance operations.

Digitalisation is changing the way we understand IEL. New streams of revenue generation resulting from online or digital economic activities remains untapped and unapplied towards steering economic growth. Despite the fact that these new digital models have been met with novel regulatory and tax approaches globally, they are proving problematic in terms of identifying the activity upon which tax should be based. This is because traditional tax rules do not contemplate digital aspects as sources of taxable income. The role of IEL in the digitalisation of the economy therefore, merits consideration, specifically in the area of domestic resource mobilisation as a factor for economic growth especially in Africa.

Currently, the world finds itself at a crisis point. The global health pandemic caused by COVID-19 has drastically changed the way we live, how we run our economies and even, how we teach and research IEL. In the post-COVID world, old rules and games may not apply any more. The scholarly interventions presented in the IEL Collective symposia offers tools for a new, pragmatic internationalism – one based on critical reflection, methodological diversity and contributes towards the development of a more holistic landscape of scholarship on law and the governance of the global economy.

Afronomicslaw.org is delighted to announce that Dr. Nicolás M. Perrone has joined the Afronomicslaw team as a Contributing Editor.

Finally, we have seen a surge in climate activism, especially from children and young adults, especially after Greta Thunberg launched the Fridays for Future (FFF) Movement in August 2018. FFF is a global movement that seeks to ‘put moral pressure on policymakers, to make them listen to the scientists, and then to take forceful action to limit global warming.’

Following the conclusion of the four-part Symposium on COVID-19 and International Economic Law in the Global South, Afronomicslaw.org is pleased to announce three follow-up webinars to continue the conversation