Dr Luca Rubini has been awarded a British Academy Small Research Grant, for the project ‘The Regulation of Subsidies in the World Trade Organisation: A Law, Economics and Political Economy Analysis’.
The main objective of this project is to rectify a significant gap in the academic and policy literature relating to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and its legal framework for subsidy regulation. Dr Rubini is critically analysing the current structure and will propose reforms to make it more coherent from an economic and political economy perspective. This is a hugely important topic: subsidy issues are the third most litigated in the WTO, and are particularly relevant in the face of new challenges (for example, climate change and green energy subsidies).
The £9,850 award will enable Dr Rubini to spend 15 months at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy to work on the inter-disciplinary project with collaborators Professor Bernard Hoekman and Professor Petros Mavroidis. These academics are respectively one of the most experienced trade economists in the world, and one of the leading trade law and economics scholars. The two-year project started in September 2015.