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Stakeholder Perspectives on an Australia-United Kingdom Free Trade Agreement
Monday 21st June, 2021
Australia and the United Kingdom launched negotiations for a free trade agreement (FTA) on 17 June 2020. Both sides have committed to an ambitious and comprehensive agreement that covers services, investment and digital trade. With an agreement-in-principle now in place, the focus turns to how to maximise the benefits of the agreement and the future of Australia-UK services trade.
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Research Grant Round 4: Successful Applicants
Jean Monnet Network: Trade & Investment in Services Associates (TIISA) announces Research Grants - Round 4
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Can progress be made multilaterally on agricultural trade?
The WTO has been experiencing deadlock in its negotiating function since the collapse of the Doha Round. This threatens to undermine the legitimacy of the WTO, and drive Members to seek progress outside the organization. The difficulties of agricultural negotiations offer a microcosm for understanding the wider multilateral universe. Against this background, a group of academics, former high-level officials of international institutions and former negotiators have come together to try to inject some new energy and new ideas into the multilateral process in a project called “New Pathways”.
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Industrial Subsidies and their impacts on exports of trading partners: The China Case
WORKING PAPER 03
This paper explores the impact of Chinese subsidy interventions in the upstream sector on the competitiveness of the downstream sector. In particular, the paper investigates the effect of Chinese subsidies on basic metal products on the export competitiveness of downstream sectors in other major trading countries. To explore the impact of base metal subsidies interventions on the downstream sector of a trading partner, we exploit both temporal variation in subsidy interventions and in base-metal consumption by the downstream sector.
“Joint Statement Initiatives” and Progress in the WTO System
Andrew Stoler, former WTO Deputy Director-General; former Office of the United States Trade Representative senior trade negotiator.
“Joint Statement Initiatives” (JSIs) are today seen by many governments as crucial to making trade progress, given some WTO Members opposition to further liberalization and rulemaking on a multilateral basis. Two governments that have actively worked to stymie progress, India and South Africa, are currently challenging the legality of JSIs within the multilateral system of the WTO in a new bid to prevent other WTO Members from moving forward on the trade front.
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Webinar: Services Domestic Regulation
Thursday 6 May, 2021
Over 140 participants from around the globe joined leading experts for an interactive and topical webinar discussing the WTO Joint Initiative on Services Domestic Regulation, hosted by the Institute for International Trade. A large high level panel, lead by key note speaker Jaime Coghi Arias - co-ordinator of the Joint Initiative spelled out the benefits of the potential Agreement
Webinar: US Trade Policy
Wednesday 5 May, 2021.
Under the Trump administration U.S. trade policy took a decidedly unilateralist turn, which had significant negative effects for multilateralism, referring to cooperation between nations in a rules-based world trading system. IIT’s Executive Director Professor Peter Draper provides probing moderation to draw out the key insights, in a must-watch conversation on U.S. trade policy.
Services Domestic Regulation - Doing the Obvious
Markus Jelitto is Counsellor at the Services Trade Division, WTO Secretariat, Geneva.
Services Trade has been growing continuously over the past three decades and was worth USD 13.3 trillion in 2017. Services value added accounts for almost half of all world trade (goods and services combined). Despite these impressive figures, the 2019 WTO World Trade Report finds that costs of trading services are about twice as high as trade cost for goods. A significant portion of these costs are attributable to regulatory divergence, as well as opaque regulations and cumbersome procedures. Through the development of disciplines on services domestic regulation, a group of currently 63 WTO members has set out to address these cost factors.
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Australia in the African Century
Dr Lauren A. Johnston is Research Associate at SOAS China Institute, Visiting Senior Lecturer, Adelaide University Institute of International Trade and Founding Director, New South Economics.
Last month’s inaugural ‘Quad’ – Australia, India, Japan and USA – leaders’ call drew attention to Australia’s Indo-Pacific strategic re-positioning. The “Indo” of that debate has so far focused mainly on ties with Indian Ocean majors - Indonesia and India.
Chasing The Windmill: What is wrong with the US approach on developing country status
Professor Xiankun LU is former senior trade diplomat of China to the WTO and now Managing Director of the consulting firm LEDECO Geneva.
The polarized positions in the WTO, particularly between the US and China, on developing country status and ‘special and differential treatment’ (S&D), makes it not only difficult to find a solution on this issue, but also impossible to foresee solutions on other issues demanding WTO reform.
This work is licensed under Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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