A trade agreement is mostly a document about what a government may not do to a foreign firm.
That description is and accurate, and it explains the objections better than the usual account does.
Tariff reduction occupies a small part of a modern text.
The rest concerns , standards, intellectual property and the treatment of investors.
Investor protection is the clause that has attracted the most resistance and deserves it.
It allows a company to sue a state directly before an panel, bypassing that state's courts.
The original purpose was to protect investment in countries whose courts could not be relied on.
The clause is now invoked most often against states with functioning , which was not the intention.
Claims have followed tobacco regulation, mining refusals and the removal of an energy subsidy.
Most were , and the cost of defending them is paid by the public whether or not they succeed.
The operates before any claim is filed, which is the effect nobody can measure.
A ministry that expects a claim writes a weaker rule and never records why.
Dispute settlement between states is a different mechanism with the opposite problem.
It works only when a losing party , and the remedy for refusal is retaliation.
is available to a large economy and is meaningless for a small one.
A small state that wins a case against a large one has won a piece of paper.
Proposals to let a winner sell its right of retaliation to another state have been discussed for twenty years.
They remain proposals, because the states that would pay are the states that must approve them.