Investment
An obligation that foreign investors be treated no less favourably than domestic investors.
The WTO’s glossary puts it as “the principle of giving others the same treatment as one’s own nationals”, and then locates it in three separate agreements, which is the part usually left out. “GATT Article 3 requires that imports be treated no less favourably than the same or similar domestically-produced goods once they have passed customs. GATS Article 17 and TRIPS Article 3 also deal with national treatment for services and intellectual property protection.” Two things follow. The obligation bites after customs, so it constrains internal taxes and regulation rather than the tariff itself — a duty at the border is not a national-treatment problem. And because goods, services and intellectual property each have their own article, the scope of the obligation is not uniform across them; the applicable agreement decides.
What a glossary settles, and what it does not. The WTO’s glossary is the organisation’s own plain-language guide to its vocabulary, so it is authoritative for what the term means in WTO usage. It is not the legal text. Where an obligation is at stake, the operative words are in the agreement the glossary points to — GATT, GATS, TRIPS and the rest — and those are what a panel would read. Use the glossary to know what is being discussed, and the agreement to know what is owed.
From the AJG lexicon archive (July 2026).
Developed by Amit Jain at allfrontierglobal.com
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