”We were delighted to participate again in UNCTAD`s mapping project and are delighted that you enjoyed the work and participation of our students.” ”It was a unique experience for students to participate in UNCTAD`s mapping project, a truly global and collaborative initiative. In addition to understanding international investment policy, students had the opportunity to develop research capabilities and contribute to an important database for researchers, negotiators and government officials. ”The IIA University mapping project is coordinated by a team supervised by Ms. Elisabeth Tuerk, Head of the IIA Section at UNCTAD. Current team members include Cree Jones, Ventzislav Kotetzov, Malvika Monga and Diana Rosert. Cree Jones, a PhD student in economics at the University of Chicago and a graduate of law school at the University of Michigan, planned and initiated the university project in 2012. The mapping methodology, including a detailed mapping guide, was developed on the basis of input from UNCTAD staff, consultants and IIA experts. The IIA Mapping Project is a cooperative initiative between UNCTAD and universities around the world to reflect the content of International Investment Agreements (IIAs). The resulting database serves as a tool for policymakers, researchers and other investment and development actors to understand trends in IIA development, assess the prevalence of different policy approaches and identify examples of contracts. The University IIA Mapping Project is an ongoing effort to represent all IAEs for which texts are available (about 3,000).

Traditional means of content analysis are ill-equipped to deal with the vast universe of international investment agreements (IIA). In this article, we propose a new approach to effectively examine more than 2,100 IAs and their 24,000 articles with unprecedented accuracy, treating contractual texts as data. Our proposed metric provides new and surprising information about the IIA universe at four different levels. First, at the global level, we use our approach to study the impact of asymmetries on the outcome of negotiations and find that industrialized countries tend to be the hallmarks of the IIA system, while developing countries tend to be its regulators. . . .