Over the past 18 months, multiple Columbia FDI Perspectives have argued for the WTO to initiate negotiations on investment facilitation. A common foundation has been the view that trade and investment are just two sides of the same coin; hence drafting an investment-facilitation agreement is just a matter of replicating its close sibling on trade facilitation. This simplistic view ignores many realities. Trade happens in an instant and generally implicates a limited number of actors and domestic laws….

The trade war waged by the United States against China has impacted economic growth and world trade since the fourth quarter of 2018. It implies that trade between the leading economies has slowed and particularly between the European Union, the United States, and China. The cross-border trade of finished products is declining with adverse consequences on the production in these economies. That may explain the reasons for the fall in GDP growth in the United States, the European Union,…