International banking and finance use of the investment treaty regime: Hong Kong as a case study

International investment law (IIL) functions at a crossroads with other branches of international law. One area which has not received sufficient scholarly inquiry is international finance and banking. This may be because historically, more disputes between foreign investors and host states have occurred in the natural resources sector, which continues to bear the lion’s share of arbitration disputes. Even though some of the earliest and most notable foreign investment disputes centred around loans and financial instruments, by the 1970s and 1980s, disputes in the natural resources sectors set the stage for the emergence of IIL as a distinct field of international economic law. In the last decade, non-primary sectors like healthcare, technology and finance have been identified as crucial sectors where more investment disputes will occur in the future. Like these sectors, international finance and banking is a highly decentralized area of law, which is gaining traction in IIL. For leading international financial hubs where the economy essentially depends on financial services, a rise in finance-related disputes has important implications for law-making internationally and regionally