Compliance politics and international investment disputes: a new dataset

Abstract

The ability to ensure compliance with investor-state arbitral awards is often regarded as one of the strengths of the international investment regime. Yet, there have been few systematic studies of compli- ance to assess the extent to which states have actually complied with adverse investor-state compensa- tion awards. This paper presents a new dataset that enables empirical research on compliance with these decisions; it is the first publicly available dataset to focus on what happens after awards are handed down, and in this way complements other databases on international investment law. This paper explains the data collection process (and its associated challenges), discusses the design choices made in selecting inputs and variables, presents a descriptive overview of the data, and examines how variables can be used in future research. Moreover, various cases are used as illustrations of the challenges of collecting and coding data on post-award processes and we explore what missing data can tell us about compliance dynamics.