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42<br />
They thereby vary partially in their definition of the term investment: The “more<br />
narrow” definition only comprehends direct investment, while the “wider” one also<br />
contains portfolio investment. But no investment agreement makes a distinction or<br />
explicitly mentions “socially productive capital”. The term “expropriation” in most<br />
agreements follows the “wider” meaning of direct expropriation and equivalent measures.<br />
Besides these bilateral investment agreements, which explicitly focus on the<br />
area of investment, the investment issue may also be a component of broader free<br />
trade agreements, as for example the “Association Agreement” between the EU<br />
and Mexico (“Global Agreement”), which was signed in 1997 and entered into force<br />
in October 2000, as well as the agreement between Chile and the EU, which was<br />
signed in November 2002 and entered into force in February 2003. On a plurilateral<br />
or multilateral level several negotiation rounds on multilateral or international investment<br />
agreements have taken place, which were in part ratified, like the plurilateral<br />
TRIMs-agreement within the WTO, and which in part failed, like the multilateral MAI<br />
within the OECD in 1998 or the (provisional) failure of the Doha Development Agenda<br />
of the WTO (see below).<br />
Continuous demands from trade and industry for international investment regulations<br />
in the form of bilateral investment agreements or embedded into free trade<br />
agreements consistently put the investment issue onto the political agenda. Foreign<br />
investors thereby chiefly prioritize the issues of investors’ rights like investment<br />
protection and legal security, market access and national treatment, as well as free<br />
capital transfer. For this reason, it is predominantly the FDI-exporting countries which<br />
speak out for a regulatory framework on an international level. The standard formulation<br />
with only small differences in formulations reads as follows:<br />
“to secure transparent, stable and predictable conditions for long-term crossborder<br />
investment, particularly foreign direct investment”. 84<br />
The issue of cross-border investment (along with the agricultural market, subsidies,<br />
services, intellectual property rights) is one of the central and most disputed<br />
topics in the current negotiations on bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements.<br />
The free trade negotiations in the framework of FTAA/ALCA, the large Free Trade<br />
Area of the Americas planned for 2005, and also the free trade negotiations between<br />
the EU and MERCOSUR explicitly refer to the “multilateral” framework of negotiations<br />
within the World Trade Organization (WTO).<br />
84 Doha-Ministerial Declaration of 2001 on the relationship of “trade and investment”.