Sustainability and corporate mechanisms in Asia

member of the Shanghai-based New Development Bank (NDB) (established in 2014) and the Beijing-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) (established in 2014). In 2016, India created a new think tank, the Center for Research in International Trade (CRIT), which supports India’s WTO, regional, and bilateral trade work; that work includes deepening regional ties on trade policy. India’s ‘Act East’ policy, which was announced in 2014, similarly seeks to advance regional connectivity. For China, several institutions supporting China’s Belt and Road Initiative have been established over the past several years, including, in the area of commercial dispute resolution, the International Commercial Dispute Prevention and Settlement Organization (located in Beijing) and the China International Commercial Court (tribunals located in Shenzhen and Xi’an). China also has ratified the ASEAN-led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) agreement, which creates ‘the largest free trade bloc in the world, covering around 30 percent of global GDP’ (p. 244); the RCEP also advances institution building by establishing an RCEP Secretariat. The world trading system is being reshaped in significant part by emerging powers like Brazil, India and China, with that work primarily occurring in the global South. With respect to emerging powers and the world trading system, the road to Geneva has been significant, but the road from Geneva is equally noteworthy. Shaffer observes that for ‘trade liberals, this book has the arc of a tragedy... As [emerging powers] rose in economic importance and built legal capacity to wield WTO law to defend and advance their positions, the United States became disenchanted with the legal order it had created’ (p. 316). But such an arc also can be considered from a different perspective: a more dispersed world trading system can allow for reconsideration of core policy priorities and respond more effectively to regional norms, practices and expectations. Shaffer’s book is a remarkable achievement: more than two decades of work and more than a few hundred interviews supporting rigorous analysis of how emerging powers have developed trade law capacity to engage with the WTO and are now redirecting that capacity in many new contexts and locations, with such dispersion of trade-related rulemaking and institution building being further accelerated by the US retreat from the WTO. The contribution of Emerging Powers and the World Trading System to our understanding of global trade in the twenty-first century will be enduring and valuable.