Originally from Journal of Damages in International Arbitration

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I.  INTRODUCTION

In a 2011 article by Linda Ahee, Leonardo Giacchino, and Rory Walck (hereafter, “Ahee et al. article”) in the World Arbitration & Mediation Review (“WAMR”), the authors presented findings about several historical trends in the amounts of compensation requested by claimants and the amounts awarded to claimants by tribunals in arbitrations administered by the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (“ICSID”).   In the article, the authors studied the trends in concluded ICSID cases through September 2010, finding that claimants were successful in winning a monetary award in 57% of concluded cases that had reached the merits stage of proceedings.  Among those cases in which the claimants won, claimants received monetary awards worth on average 42.9% of the compensation that they requested.  The valuation method most frequently used by tribunals to calculate the compensation owed to claimants was the asset-based method whereas claimants used both income- and asset-based methods an equal number of times to value their claims.  Claimants recovered a greater share of their amounts claimed (50.7%) when tribunals used income-based methods to calculate the amount awarded than when tribunals used asset-based methods (33.3%).  Finally, claimants’ recovery of their claim was greater when tribunals adopted the same valuation methods that were used by the claimants. 

In this article, we expand the timeframe of analysis of the Ahee et al. article with information from the caseload of concluded ICSID cases as of March 31, 2017,  and we adopt time value of money methodologies to compare monetary awards across time.  This expanded case database presents a different set of trends than previously reported.