Challenging corporate investor rule

Institute for Policy Studies (USA) | 1 May 2007

Challenging Corporate Investor Rule

By Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies
and Sara Grusky of Food and Water Watch

Release date : April 2007

Summary

This report examines how global corporations have increased their power through rules and institutions
designed to provide unprecedented and sweeping protections to private foreign investors. These
increasingly controversial protections are promoted by the World Bank and other international financial
institutions, codified by bilateral investment treaties and free trade agreements, and enforced
through international arbitration tribunals. Civil society groups — including labor, environmental
and human rights groups — have been harshly critical of these rules, charging that they elevate the
narrow interests of global corporations above social and environmental goals. They have been joined
by an increasing number of legislators around the world, including in the United States, who have attacked
these measures as fundamentally undemocratic. And now, new political leaders, particularly
in South America, are beginning to explore ways of challenging these excessive investor protections
and putting forth proposals for more just trade and investment regimes.

Download the report (36pp 2MB PDF) : http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/070430-challengingcorporateinvestorrule.pdf

source: IPS