Application of Dispute Settlement in Free Trade Agreements (FTAs’): A Cross Country Analysis of Modern FTAs’

Most modern free trade agreements (FTAs’) include chapters on a variety of topics such as investment, digital trade, labour, gender, environment and small-medium enterprises. These new issues are often addressed in FTAs’ as there is a lack of development of multilateral rules on these areas at the World Trade Organization (WTO). Further, many of these aspects are non-trade issuesviz. environment, labour, competition policy, and investment. These areas are contentious and often face opposition from the Global South and are frequently excluded from the scope of dispute settlement. Against this background, this article examines the trends with respect to the application of the dispute settlement across recent FTAs’ concluded by certain developed countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia, the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom (UK). This article examines recent FTAs’ and categorizes its chapters as follows: (1) Chapters always subject to dispute settlement, (2) Chapters not subjected to dispute settlement and (3) Chapters that have inconsistent recourse to dispute settlement. Accordingly, the article provides a cross country assessment of the FTA chapters with dispute settlement provisions and the rationale behind such divergent practices. FTA, developed, non-trade, dispute settlement, sustainable trade, USMCA, gender, environment, labour, multilateralism.