-
From Market Access to Accessing the Market: Aid for Trade and the Program of the World Bank
In the early 1990s, traffic along Lao PDR’s gravel-surfaced Road 13-the backbone of country’s road system-crawled at about 35 km per hour. Other provincial roads were also in disrepair, with road maintenance only rarely undertaken across the network. The government, working with the World Bank Group in successive International Development Association (IDA) projects, built or…
-
Editorial
A well-maintained road network in Laos that connects farms to markets. An empowerment program for unemployed workers, SMEs, and women entrepreneurs designed to boost economic activity in Mauritius. These are two tangible examples of aid-for-trade initiatives described by the World Bank’s Richard Newfarmer and Elisa Gamberoni in TNI’s lead article this month. Newfarmer and Gamberoni…
-
News and publications
Europe says €100 billion needed in climate change financing for developing countries The heads of European Member States agreed in late October that developing countries will need €100 billion a year by 2020 to adapt to climate change, although they failed to reach consensus on how much money would flow from Europe’s coffers. At least half…
-
The Lisbon Treaty—Implications for Europe’s International Investment Agreements
With the Lisbon Treaty expected to take effect on 1 December 2009, TNI explores its potential impacts on the International Investment Agreements (IIAs) of the European Community and EU Member States. This is part of a series of articles in TNI that analyze the implications of the Lisbon Treaty for Europe’s external economic policies, and…
-
Ensuring flexibility: A survey of safeguard measures in regional and bilateral trade agreements
Safeguards, anti-dumping measures and countervailing duties are classified as trade defence instruments or trade remedies, intended to protect domestic production against foreign imports. However, safeguards differ from anti-dumping measures and countervailing duties in an important respect: while the latter are actions against unfairly traded imports, safeguards can be implemented on products imported…
-
Duty-free and quota-free access to the EU market for Caribbean rice exports: A necessary but insufficient step forward
As of 1 January 2010, the two main ACP rice exporters, Guyana and Suriname, will benefit from duty-free and quota-free access to the EU market. This improved market access has been a long-standing request from the Caribbean region, and is much needed. After a prosperous era in which Caribbean rice exports benefited from preferential access…
-
Monitoring regional integration in the ACP: The case for a coordinated approach
In November 2008, the ACP Secretariat launched the “ACP Monitoring Regional Integration” (MRI) project[1]. The MRI project, which is supported financially by the European Community and managed by the ACP Secretariat[2], is intended to design and implement a system of regional integration indicators that can be applied to twelve ACP Regional Integration Organisations (RIOs)[3], with…
-
WTO Roundup
Brussels and Latin American banana producers close to agreement Trade officials were reportedly close to reaching a deal on the long-standing dispute over banana tariffs, as TNI was going to press. EU banana import policies have been the subject of a decade-long row at the WTO, pitting Brussels against several Latin American banana producers and the…
-
EPA Update
ACP Technical Follow-up Group discusses common challenges in EPA negotiations and implementation High-level African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) negotiators and representatives from Regional Integration Organisations exchanged information on the state of play in regional EPA negotiations and their implementation at the ACP Technical Follow-up Group meeting held…
-
Events
November 2-4 COMESA Trade and Customs Committee meeting, Mombasa, Kenya 2-6 Technical Workshop on Rules of Origin in the CARIFORUM-EC Economic Partnership Agreement, Jamaica 9-10 3rd ACP Civil Society Forum, Brussels, Belgium 10-13 EU-ECOWAS technical level negotiations and Senior Officials meeting, Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire 11 …
-
Resources
All references are available at: www.acp-eu-trade.org/library EPAs: To be or not to be? Sanoussi Bilal, ECDPM, to be published in Jones and Marti (eds.). Updating the EPAs to match today’s global challenges, 2009, www.acp-eu-trade.org Council Decision on the procedure concerning derogations from the rules of origin set out in the Origin Protocols annexed to Economic Partnership…