Linking America and the European Union in the world's largest free-trade area could, according to an independent study for the European Commission, add more than €200 billion ($224 billion) to economic output on both sides of the Atlantic. In the overall scheme of things, therefore, one of the biggest obstacles to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (ttip) seems a smallish detail: agreeing on what legal redress a foreign investor should have when it thinks a host country is pulling the rug from under it. Yet activists on the two sides of the Atlantic have made investor-state dispute settlement (isds), as it is known, the centrepiece of their opposition to ttip and other free-trade deals.
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