In a world of heightened geopolitical and geoeconomic tensions, the aim of this article is to contribute to the line of scholarship that looks at the ways in which investment screening measures interact with other fields and asks how such measures govern/interact with technology transfers. The US, EU, and UK investment screening measures have as their main goal the protection of national security and are often premised on the need to protect the technological lead of the adopting country/economy by stopping/limiting the access of countries of concern to critical technologies. This is not a new phenomenon and had also guided Western strategies during the Cold War. The article argues that the different investment screening regimes cannot be analysed in isolation. This is because they are part of larger economic and national security strategies of the adopting countries/economies and there is significant coordination between the US and its allies, such as the EU and UK. Furthermore, due to the importance of critical technologies the screening regimes analysed cover/have the potential to cover a wide array of tech transfers, be they formal, informal, business-to-business (B2B), university-to-business (U2B), tangible or intangible.
Legal Issues of Economic Integration