Our study for the European Commission's DG Trade serving as a background document to the Commission's impact assessment has just been published. The Commission has proposed to modernise the existing bilateral trade framework and requested a mandate from the Council to negotiate such modernisation with Turkey. Download the study.
In a blogpost on the World Economic Forum's Agenda website, Dan Ciuriak and Derk Bienen discuss three alternative modes of how developing countries can acquire technology: “build” (developing new technology in-house), “borrow” (attracting FDI), and “buy” (buying technology). The authors suggest that the third mode constitutes an alternative to the mainstream "build" and "borrow" modes worthwhile to be considered by policy-makers in developing countries, and provide some recommendations for its implementation.
Dan Ciuriak, Hanne Melin and Derk Bienen contribute an analysis of the design principles for the mega regional trade negotiations to facilitate SME utilisation of these agreements. Published in the Brazilian edition of the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development’s journal, Pontes.
An English version of the paper is available on SSRN.
In the April issue of the Global Trade and Customs Journal, Derk Bienen discusses the potential role that an Administrative Protective Order (APO) system could have in EU Trade Defence proceedings: The Quest for Finding the Balance between Transparency and Confidentiality in EU Trade Defence Cases.
Since November 2014, we have been assisting the Union of Comoros in its WTO accession negotiations, in a project funded by DFID's Trade Advocacy Fund. The accession process is still at a relatively early stage; the latest milestone being the submission of the Memorandum on the Foreign Trade Regime to the WTO in July 2013.