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9781107119536

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Advance praise: 'Well before the current hype in Europe over investor-state dispute settlement, Poulsen pioneered the view that many countries signed up to investment protection treaties in less than rational ways. This book provides careful, country-specific evidence in support, with eye-opening stories from across the world, ranging from Pakistan and Ghana to the Czech Republic, Costa Rica and South Africa. Countries simply assumed the economic benefits of investment treaties and underestimated the possibility and costs of legal claims. World Bank and UN officials promoted the treaties and so did Western lawyers and advisors. Debunking the rational premise of much of the academic scholarship, this book should be compulsory reading for a new generation of policymakers and scholars alike, if only to avoid the mistakes of the past and find better ways to address today's increasingly complex challenges of economic diplomacy.' Joost Pauwelyn, Graduate Institute, Geneva Advance praise: 'BITs don't have to be boring! Lauge Poulsen has developed a simple yet elegant framework based on bounded rationality to explain why many less developed countries have made rationally foolish choices when signing bilateral investment treaties. By slightly relaxing the strong assumptions of rationality, and combining it with careful in-depth case analysis, he provides a compelling account of the bilateral investment treaty regime and its sometimes perverse consequences.' Duncan Snidal, Nuffield College, Oxford Advance praise: 'In explaining why developing countries signed on to investment treaties that were arguably not in their interests, Poulsen adds greatly to Graham Allison's ground-breaking analysis of the Cuban Missile Crisis so that we can better understand how government decision-making - in rich as well as poor countries - works in practice.' Louis T. Wells, Herbert F. Johnson Professor of International Management, Emeritus, Harvard Business School Advance praise: 'Lauge Poulsen makes a truly innovative contribution to political economy by using a rich set of insights from cognitive psychology and behavioral economics to explain the spread and impact of bilateral investment treaties. His thorough statistical and qualitative research convincingly demonstrates the superiority of this bounded-rationality theory over conventional rationalist accounts.' Kurt Weyland, Mike Hogg Professor in Liberal Arts, Department of Government, University of Texas, Austin

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Lauge N. Skovgaard Poulsen is a Lecturer in International Political Economy at University College London.

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