Many investor‐State dispute settlements are administered through the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (“ICSID”). ICSID, with the consent of both parties, has made available many of the awards rendered. The publicly available information in the awards has been used to respond a number of questions about investment arbitration by different researchers but none has looked into the size and trend of compensation awarded.

 

Early work on monetary awards by Susan Franck1 has been discussed by practitioners and academia. Professor Franck concluded that “Despite the fact that investors claimed US$343 million in damages on average, that is not what they received. Rather, tribunals awarded investors only US$10 million on average. This US$333 million difference is not insubstantial, and it may give investors a basis for some reflection about the value of arbitration – particularly given the need to pay the arbitral tribunal and the other legal costs associated with bringing a claim.” The amounts calculated by Professor Franck contain mistakes, are (unintentionally) biased and do not consider the time value of money.

 

More recently, Transnational Dispute Management (TDM) published a damages study of ICSID cases authored by Tim Hart. This study presents statistics about claimed and awarded amounts in ICSID cases, but contains errors similar to those found in Franck.