Special Issue
Vol. XVII, No. 1
(Winter '25)

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As India moves towards Viksit Bharat@2047, the services sector continues to be the key driver of this growth. The sector has consistently grown at a faster pace than the overall Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and is the second largest employer after agriculture. It is the largest recipient of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and a major contributor to India’s international trade, playing a pivotal role in driving the country’s export earnings and strengthening its position in global value chains. India has consistently been among the top ten exporters of services, with a positive trade balance. Owing to this significant contribution, India is often referred to as a service-led economy.

In recent times, India’s services exports have been facing a lot of challenges, both due to challenges in the domestic and export markets. In this context, this paper aims to provide an overview of India’s services sector, its position in global services trade and its contribution to India’s trade. It looks at trade by modes of service delivery and sub-sectors.  It explores how services are addressed under India’s trade agreements. It identifies challenges faced by the services sector that limit the sector’s competitiveness, export potential, and ability to attract FDI. It makes recommendations, including the formulation of a comprehensive vision document that can foster inclusive growth, enhance productivity, generate quality employment opportunities, boost trade and investment, and strengthen India’s global competitiveness in the services sector.

This article examines the 2025 deployment of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) as an instrument of United States (US) tariff policy and the wider legal, institutional, and geopolitical consequences of that turn. Building on doctrinal analysis, legislative history, case law, and contemporaneous policy events, the study reconstructs how IEEPA, which was historically a sanctions and export-control statute, was repurposed to impose country-specific import duties on China, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, India and others. This article situates this novel practice alongside existing executive tariff authorities of the US (Sections 201, and 301 of Trade Act and Section 232 of Trade Expansion Act) to show how statutory design, procedural gaps, and the National Emergencies Act’s (NEA) termination dynamics created opportunities for rapid executive action of the US President. It traces the ensuing institutional rupture, congressional bills to curtail presidential tariff power, parallel litigation against IEEPA sanctions that imposed tariffs across the federal courts and the US Court of International Trade, and fractures in judicial reasoning over jurisdiction, the major-questions doctrine, and non-delegation. This article then assesses the diplomatic and commercial fallout, negotiated framework agreements, World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute, and asymmetric impacts on trade partners, with a focused case study on India’s exposure and policy responses. This article argues that the IEEPA-tariff episode exemplifies a broader shift from rule-based multilateralism to transactional, power-based trade diplomacy.

Retaliation has long been the principal means through which countries enforce their international trade commitments. Yet even during the years when the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) dispute settlement system operated as originally designed in 1994, the effective use of retaliation remained elusive, particularly for smaller economies confronting larger trading partners. The collapse of the Appellate Body, coupled with the sweeping tariff increases imposed by the United States (U.S.) during the Trump II administration, further exposed the fragility of retaliation as an enforcement tool. While many countries hesitated to respond, Brazil emerged as a notable exception. This article examines Brazil’s distinctive approach to retaliation. It first analyses the legal strategies and institutional mechanisms Brazil developed to operationalise retaliation within the multilateral framework, highlighting how it distinguished itself from other developing countries during the WTO’s first 25 years. It then considers Brazil’s more recent legislative reforms enabling unilateral retaliation and reflects on the paradox that, despite these innovations, countries — including Brazil — ultimately refrained from retaliating against the United States’ global tariffs.

The United States’ veto of the appointments of Members of the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) led to a systemic gridlock in the resolution of multilateral trade disputes within the WTO. To salvage the situation, some Members of the WTO established the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Agreement (MPIA Agreement) under Article 25 of the Dispute Settlement Understanding as a temporary machinery for appellate review. This paper situates the MPIA within the ideological foundations of the WTO and the broader international dispute settlement systems while critically examining the efficacy, efficiency, and prospects of the MPIA as a viable substitute for the WTO Appellate Body. By analysing the content of the Agreement and some decisions of the MPIA, as well as political and academic sentiments, this paper argues that the MPIA is more makeshift than evolutionary. This work concludes that while the MPIA preserves appellate review to an extent in the short term, the WTO needs a more permanent, enduring reform for a credible and effective appellate system.

Digital Economic Agreements (DEAs) have come to occupy a distinct and increasingly significant role in the regulation of digital trade.  Unlike the broader and more traditional scope of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) that also tackle issues of trade in goods, services, and intellectual property rights, DEAs are directed specifically at establishing rule-frameworks for the digital economy. This article situates DEAs as a new type of treaties in context – both with regard to the global landscape of digital trade rulemaking and to its evolution over time. It offers a detailed analysis of the DEAs in place, providing insights into their legal architecture, common provisions and novel features. The article pays, in addition, particular attention to the DEAs’ mechanisms to safeguard regulatory autonomy, which becomes all the more critical considering the broader set of issues that DEAs cover. The article then compares with and reveals the contrast between the DEA model and the ongoing negotiations towards an Agreement on Electronic Commerce under the umbrella of the World Trade Organization (WTO). In terms of analytical query, we highlight the advantages of DEAs as a flexible as well as a forward-oriented model of digital trade regulation that potentially is up to the challenge of keeping up with a technologically fluid environment and could pave the path towards digital trade law 4.0. This evaluation remains however nuanced, as the evidence is still out, as to whether DEAs have a real impact on the ground and whether they reduce, rather than exacerbate, the existing fragmentation in the regulation of the data-driven economy.

The World Trade Organization’s (WTO) role in international trade governance has eroded over the past two decades, and that trend has accelerated under the second Trump Administration in the United States. The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement) was negotiated during the Uruguay Round to provide baseline standards of intellectual property (IP) protection and enforcement, combined with legalised WTO dispute settlement. This essay explores the continuing role of the TRIPS Agreement in the post-WTO international economic order, suggesting that the fate of the WTO from a governance (including dispute settlement) standpoint, and that of the TRIPS Agreement from a norm-setting standpoint, are largely distinct. TRIPS Agreement standards have become sufficiently embedded in the national laws of WTO Members, integrated into other trade agreements and arrangements, and otherwise referenced as baseline IP standards to have achieved the status of a type of common law, in the sense of a lex mercatoria, that should persist as benchmark standards for intellectual property protection and enforcement regardless of the fate of the WTO as an institution.

The author, as a law and economics scholar in this article, drawing on personal experience, especially in Papua New Guinea in the early 1980s, in contrast to his exposure to theoretical principles of economics as a Fellow in Law and Economics at the University of Chicago a few years earlier, confronts the chasm between theory on the books and policy and institutional challenges on the ground in most developing countries, especially the poorest and most traditional (as was the case of Papua New Guinea in the early 1980s and still today). He attempts to draw some lessons from this and other experiences for contemporary trade and development policy, especially for insiders and outsiders and for lawyers in particular.