Global trade 2025 27 March 2025 — 8:00AM TO 6:00PM Anonymous (not verified) 26 September 2024 Chatham House and Online

Join government officials, global business and civil society leaders to discuss how economic security policies are changing the global landscape and what stakeholders can do to prepare for this.

You will receive further instructions regarding your registration soon.

The path towards economic security

The dynamics of global trade have reached an inflection point. Growing geopolitical fragmentation has driven competition and emerging trade wars in key regions. The architecture at the heart of global trade is increasingly outdated in addressing the needs of a modern, digital economy. Meanwhile the implications of global megatrends such as climate change are increasingly felt throughout global supply chains – demanding a coordinated response from the international community.

The resulting instability in this environment is driving government decision makers to embrace the developing trend of economic security. The principles of free trade, which have for decades formed the bedrock of the multilateral trading system, are taking a back seat in this evolving landscape. From the use of subsidies and tariffs, to the redrawing of supply chains with an eye to the geopolitical alignments of the future and through to the rise of ‘mini-lateral’ trade agreements, all these shifts will have profound implications for years to come.

The 2025 Global Trade Conference traces the implications of this path towards economic security within the global trade landscape, exploring the shifting dynamics across key regions, and examining the influence of global megatrends such as advanced technological development and climate change.

Why attend?

• Gain unique insights into the role that economic security will play in the future of global trade and what this means for business and government stakeholders alike.
• Hear from industry leading speakers on the crucial topics that will define the global trade landscape in the years to come.
• Come together with industry peers to meet in-person at Chatham House, network with leading experts in global trade and benefit from access to exclusive, in-person sessions held under the Chatham House Rule.

The institute occupies a position of respect and trust, and is committed to fostering inclusive dialogue at all events. Event attendees are expected to uphold this by adhering to our code of conduct.

Next steps for EU-US cooperation on trade and technology 8 December 2022 — 3:00PM TO 4:00PM Anonymous (not verified) 21 November 2022 Online

How can the EU and US increase cooperation on AI, semi-conductors and funding information communication technology services?

On trade and technology policy, the EU and the US are making meaningful progress towards cooperation while at the same time navigating tensions. As senior officials meet on 5 December for the third meeting of the Trade and Technology Council (TTC), both sides have vowed to move towards concrete results. But can the US and EU increase cooperation on artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and funding information communication technology services? 

This event draws on insights from a forthcoming Briefing Paper by Marianne Schneider-Petsinger that explores next steps for US-EU cooperation on trade and technology, which is part of a project supported by the Hanns Seidel Foundation. 

What the US election means for trade policy Expert comment LJefferson 10 October 2024

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump could not be more different when it comes to trade, despite a changed economic landscape.

Trade policy is playing a relatively subdued role in this autumn’s US election. Yes, former president Trump has proposed tariffs of anywhere from 20 per cent to 100 per cent, asserting the revenue could fund policy areas from deficit reduction to childcare, all while growing US employment and promoting world peace.
  
But unlike 2020, or even more 2016, the international trade architecture has not been a lively part of this year’s campaign. The two parties now start from a shared expectation of an international economic landscape shaped more by competition and industrial policy than by continued liberalization. However, the two presidential candidates’ views of which trade tools to use, and whether to proceed with allies and partners or unilaterally, could not be more different.

New set of trade expectations

A large part of the relative calm has to do with the emergence of a new set of expectations on trade that are shared across Republicans and Democrats, and that are unlikely to shift in the next four years regardless of who occupies the White House.

First, neither party can field the support to pass a traditional comprehensive free trade agreement through Congress. While each party still has a wing of elected officials who would like to see the US return to negotiating deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or attempt expansive new deals with Europe or in the Western Hemisphere, they are unlikely to reach critical mass in the immediate future, regardless of who holds the White House – or who controls Congress.

This shift in perception of the relative value of such deals – and their potential to cause political blowback for legislators – also means that the cost to any administration that wanted to propose such a deal would be high.

Second, there is broad bipartisan support to continue measures aimed at promoting US security in the face of high-technology challenges from Beijing that have both military and security applications. This means continued US activism in export controls and other more innovative measures.

Less divergence on clean energy

While there is also cross-party enthusiasm for approaches to building up US manufacturing that fall under the rubric of industrial policy, the parties diverge significantly when it comes to specific content. However, around clean energy that divergence will be less than the campaign trail rhetoric suggests.

Because clean energy generation is spread so broadly across the United States – with a great deal of wind and solar generation in Republican-governed ‘red states,’ and investment from the Inflation Reduction Act flowing to red states as much or more than blue ones – such incentives, and their effects on trade policy, are here to stay. Despite this, a Republican presidency or Congress will certainly seek to water down or eliminate parts of the Inflation Reduction Act that focus specifically on transition away from fossil fuels.
 
Coupled with this commitment to making America a clean energy superpower, there is considerable cross-party interest in trade initiatives that promote clean energy and manufacturing – whether from a climate perspective or a pure economic competitiveness perspective. A wide range of creative proposals are buzzing around Congress and think-tanks – from a carbon border measure, to resuscitating the Global Steel Arrangement, to critical mineral-focused deals. Though the topic is often overlooked in overviews of trade policy, it is the one where we are most likely to see classic trade tools used.

A vast difference between the two candidates

Beyond those broad strokes of an emerging ‘new Washington consensus,’ as former US trade representative and current head of the Council on Foreign Relations Michael Froman describes it: who wins the presidency will make a vast difference in what Washington does on trade – and how it aims to achieve its goals.

A Harris administration will aim to develop shared economic security agendas with allies and partners – quite possibly expanding beyond the Biden Administration’s G7 focus to pursue more deals with a broader range of partners. Trump, on the other hand, has explicitly said he will pursue US economic interests at the expense of allies and partners. ‘Under my leadership,’ he said in a speech in Georgia last month, ‘we’re going to take other countries’ jobs,’ specifically citing allies Germany and South Korea as targets.

While Vice-President Harris has criticized Trump’s tariff proposals, and noted their likely negative effects on consumers, she has not signalled that she would make changes to the tariffs on China first imposed by President Trump and then adjusted by President Biden. 
A Trump administration would use tariffs aggressively, but it remains absolutely unclear how. 

Building trust in trade deals – is human rights monitoring the answer? 27 May 2021 — 4:00PM TO 5:15PM Anonymous (not verified) 14 May 2021 Online

Exploring the arguments in favour of more robust human rights monitoring systems and why effective monitoring mechanisms have proved so difficult to get up and running.

Please click on the below link to confirm your participation and receive your individual joining details from Zoom for this event. You will receive a confirmation email from Zoom, which contains the option to add the event to your calendar if you so wish.

The recent signing of the EU-China Investment Agreement has reignited arguments about trade and human rights. While many trade agreements envisage human rights monitoring in some shape or form, the monitoring systems that have emerged so far are not especially coherent, systematic or impactful. 

Are the human rights commitments in trade agreements more than just window-dressing?  If so, what kind of monitoring is needed to ensure they are lived up to? 

At this panel event, which marks the launch of a new Chatham House research paper, participants explore the arguments in favour of more robust human rights monitoring systems and why effective monitoring mechanisms have proved so difficult to get up and running in this context. 

• What factors are presently holding governments back, and where is innovation and investment most needed?
• What are the political, economic and structural conditions for fair and effective human rights monitoring of trade agreements? 
• Is human rights monitoring best done unilaterally – or should more effort be put into developing joint approaches? 
• What role might human rights monitoring have to play in governments’ strategies to ‘build back better’ from the COVID-19 pandemic?

Monitoring of trade deals needs a risk-based approach Expert comment NCapeling 24 May 2021

On human rights issues, trading partners must do more than trust to luck.

The recent row within the UK government about the treatment of agricultural products in a proposed new trade deal with Australia provides a reminder that changes to trading arrangements can have social and environmental costs, as well as benefits.

Although the UK government clearly feels political pressure to demonstrate its ‘Global Britain’ credentials with some speedily concluded new deals, rushing ahead without a full understanding of the social, environmental, and human rights implications risks storing up problems for later. In the meantime, calls for better evaluation and monitoring of trade agreements against sustainability-related commitments and goals – ideally with statutory backing – will only get stronger.

EU experiences with these kinds of processes are instructive. For more than 20 years the Directorate General for Trade of the European Commission (DG Trade) has been commissioning sustainability impact assessments (SIAs) from independent consultants in support of trade negotiations, and since 2012 these assessments have explicitly encompassed human rights impacts as a core part of the analysis.

These processes have since been augmented with a programme of periodic ‘ex post’ evaluations of trade agreements to ‘analyse the observed economic, social, human rights, and environmental impacts’ of live trade deals and to make recommendations about any mitigation action which may be needed.

For credibility and objectivity, the Commission outsources much of its sustainability assessment and ex post evaluation activities to independent consultants, who are encouraged to innovate and tailor their approaches subject to broad methodological parameters laid down by the Commission. Over time, experiences with specific assessment and monitoring assignments have enabled external SIA practitioners – and the Commission itself – to progressively strengthen these processes and underlying methodologies.

Yet despite the improvements there remains legitimate questions about whether the human rights aspects of these SIA processes – and subsequent evaluations – are having real policy impact. The difficulty of predicting human rights impacts of trade agreements in advance – as the COVID-19 crisis amply demonstrates – suggests a need for realism about the extent to which a ‘one off’ process, often carried out at a time when there is only ‘agreement in principle’ as to future trading terms, can produce a robust roadmap for heading off future human rights-related risks.

Human rights impact assessments have a potentially valuable role to play in laying down the substantive and structural foundations for future human rights monitoring as part of a broader, iterative, human rights risk management strategy. But the fragmented manner in which many trade agreements approach human rights issues, and the fact that outcomes are the product of negotiation rather than necessarily design, make it difficult to turn this vision into reality.

Controversies surrounding the SIA process for the EU-Mercosur agreement illustrate why striving for more coherence in the identification and subsequent management of human rights-related risks is important. In June 2019, the Commission decided to wrap up negotiations with the South America Mercosur bloc, even though the SIA process for the proposed agreement was still incomplete and the interim and final SIA reports yet to be delivered. Frustrated NGOs made their feelings clear in the form of a formal complaint – and a slap on the wrist from the EU Ombudsman duly followed.

However, when it eventually appeared in December 2020, the final SIA report for the EU-Mercosur deal did include a number of interesting recommendations for responding to specific areas of human rights-related risk identified through the pre-signing assessment process – such as flanking measures designed to address issues pertaining to health, equality, and protection of indigenous peoples, and stressing the need for ‘continuous monitoring’.

Hopefully these recommendations will be proactively followed up, but there are reasons not to be overly optimistic about that. To the extent that these recommendations might have required, or benefitted from, some tweaks to the terms of the trade agreement itself, it was clearly too late. And while there may be opportunities for EU institutions to follow up the recommendations through unilateral ex post evaluation processes, current legal, policy, and institutional arrangements provide few guarantees this will take place.

The credibility of the EU SIA programme has clearly taken a knock because of the problems with the EU-Mercosur process, and stakeholders could be forgiven for questioning whether expending time and effort on engaging in these processes is actually worthwhile. As a first step towards rectifying this, the Commission should be transparent about how it plans to respond to the EU-Mercosur SIA recommendations regarding flanking measures and follow up – ideally consulting with stakeholders about the various human rights monitoring options available.

Looking further ahead, the Commission should be urging SIA practitioners to deal more expansively with the options for follow up human rights monitoring in future SIA reports, setting out recommendations not just on the need for ongoing monitoring of human rights-related issues but on the detail of how this might be done, and how progress towards human rights-related goals could be tracked. And creativity should be encouraged because, as detailed in a newly-published Chatham House research paper, there may be more opportunities for human rights monitoring than first appear.

The SIA process could also provide a forum for exploring complementary measures needed to make future monitoring efforts as effective as possible – jointly and unilaterally; politically, structurally, and resources-wise; both within the framework of the trading relationship and extraneously. The credibility of the process – and hence stakeholder trust – would be further enhanced by commitments from the Commission to be more transparent in future about how different human rights monitoring recommendations laid out in SIAs have been taken into account in subsequent negotiations, in the supervisory arrangements developed for specific trading relationships, and in the implementation of EU trade policy more generally.

Re-imagining trade for domestic and foreign policy Expert comment NCapeling 7 December 2021

Exploring future trade policy through issues such as the green transition, labour standards, human rights, the role of the WTO, and non-trade policy objectives.

Balancing trade and non-trade policy objectives

Marianne Schneider-Petsinger

The supply chain disruptions stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic highlight trade cannot be taken for granted, and economic interdependencies have both benefits and costs. As international commerce rebounds and trade policy is increasingly seen through the prism of enhancing resilience, the moment is ripe to redefine and reimagine trade.

The goal of trade policy has never been to increase trade for trade’s sake, so a new narrative and framework for global trade requires striking a careful balance between pursuing trade and non-trade policy objectives.

Protecting the environment, strengthening labour standards, and upholding human rights have long been goals for which trade policy is used as a lever, and the interaction of trade and national security interests as well as the links between trade and competition policy are not new issues either.

All these non-trade policy aspects have come to the forefront as the geopolitical context has shifted and the transition to green and digital economies has gathered force – and, at times, these different non-trade policy goals clash.

The US and European Union (EU) are promoting solar energy to fight climate change but supply chains for solar panels are heavily reliant on forced labour from Xinjiang, and hence it is not yet certain whether environmental or human rights concerns will prevail. However, it is clear trade policy tools can be part of a comprehensive solution which manages inherent tensions while still advancing both objectives.

Trade policy is also not just a foreign policy instrument but links closely to domestic policy – the populist backlash against globalization in much of the developed world, especially the US and Europe, was in part driven by anti-trade sentiment.

While American attitudes towards trade improved after the 2016 election of Donald Trump, positive views towards trade dropped sharply in 2021. The Biden administration’s worker-centred trade policy aims to address distributional effects of international economic integration which is a long-standing challenge. Thus, tackling non-trade policy issues without losing sight of this unresolved core issue requires careful calibration.

Trade policy is being pulled in many different directions at the same time as the core institution governing global trade – the World Trade Organization (WTO) – is in crisis, and it is uncertain how much of the non-trade policy agenda the WTO can handle. If the linkage to non-trade policy becomes too strong, this could be the straw that breaks the WTO’s back, but if it is too weak, the WTO risks becoming irrelevant in efforts to tackle key global challenges.

But if its 164 members can generate trade-oriented solutions to non-trade issues, they can revive the organization and mobilize domestic support for global trade at the same time. This balancing act in managing the tensions between trade and non-trade policy objectives lies at the centre of future-proofing trade policy and global trade governance.

Developing countries must be part of green trade revolution

Carolyn Deere Birkbeck

The biggest challenge in taking environmental efforts forward within the multilateral context is to successfully combine environmental ambition with an approach which engages developing countries as partners, reflects their environment-related trade priorities, and addresses their sustainable development interests.

The importance of engaging developing countries must not be underestimated because it is vital a global green economy does not leave the poorest behind, or becomes two-tier where green trade happens only between certain countries and the essential task of incentivizing and supporting sustainable production and consumption patterns in all countries is neglected.

The new member-led initiatives at the WTO do signal that, while the rulemaking and negotiating functions remain central to the global trade body, governments recognize the need for enhanced, transparent, and inclusive policy dialogue as well as problem-solving on sectoral issues and specific trade-related challenges.

Given the well-documented challenges of achieving multilateral consensus at the WTO, governments are exploring new ways to work within multilateral frameworks and to redefine what progress and successful outcomes should look like.

Therefore, there is a need for best practices, voluntary action, pledges, and guidelines to both sustain the relevance of the multilateral trading system and support policy action at the national level for trade which underpins environmental and wider sustainable goals.

Making progress on an environmental agenda which reflects sustainable development concerns requires stronger leadership, engagement, and advocacy from business, civil society, and research communities in both developing and developed countries, as well as economies in transition.

Meaningful, inclusive dialogue and action at the WTO also requires deeper efforts to build policy coherence among environment, development, and trade policymaking at home, with environmental ministries having a key role to play in bringing expertise to bear and ensuring strong regulatory environments and institutions for the implementation of national, regional, and international environmental commitments.

But at the domestic level, many countries still have to overcome complex politics and diverse interests as they work to transform their economies toward greater sustainability and tackle the costs of transition.

Social preparation holds the key to trade transitions

Bernice Lee 

Trade being often depicted as the mother of all ills should not come as a surprise, as politicians are only too happy to put the blame on trade when all sorts of exogenous shocks, such as technological change, could actually be the trigger which fires the bullet into local industries or jobs.

Admittedly trade does have a way of breaking the seams in the social fabric but the fact politicians often ignore negative impacts of trade means its benefits can be likened to Schrodinger’s cat, both real and illusive. But trade being mainly depicted as a ‘zero-sum’ pursuit and trade deals as the result of swashbuckling duels belie the reality that the real business of trade is often boring, bureaucratic, but necessary.

This is particularly true when trade provides access to a much larger variety of necessary products, such as medicine, food, and minerals, which can be expensive to make domestically. Selling products and services abroad also brings in the hard currency needed to buy these goods or to spend on trips abroad.

This does not take away the fact trade is extremely disruptive but, as a result of all the theorizing and understandable rants about trade, large swathes of the international community have effectively foregone it as a force for good or as an instrument which – while not the answer to all problems – can help smooth the path to well-being through efficiency gains and income growth, as well as putting to work the theory of comparative advantage as promised by the textbooks.

Alas, what the textbooks do not clearly spell out – until recently – is that trade brings positive benefits only if a society is ready for trade, which often means having the cushion for social protection such as healthcare, unemployment benefits, and opportunities for training and reskilling.

The ‘China shock’ literature vividly depicts how workers rarely seamlessly move from one job or sector to another and so, without adequate social protection, trade not only magnifies existing fractures, it also exacerbates inequality. As the aftershock lingers for decades, the lesson learned is the importance of social readiness for trade, especially the role played by governments in providing support for workers as part of the adjustment to trade and globalization.

Authors of this China shock literature recently suggested the next shock will be the transition from fossil fuel production, but the good news is this so-called ‘just transition’ challenge is one which proponents of green energy are well aware of.

But ultimately the China shock could be the dry run for the advent of machine intelligence, meaning better preparation is needed with solid social policies, investment in institutional readiness, and social preparedness to ensure the machines only take on monotonous and unsafe work – not our livelihoods and communities.

Trading partners must move to creating human rights impact

Dr Jennifer Zerk

The question of whether, and how, trade policy should be used as a way of addressing human rights concerns remains controversial and attempts to link the two still attract accusations of ‘protectionism’ and ‘neo-colonialism’.

Momentum appears to be behind those arguing for greater alignment between trade policy and human rights objectives – a trend which is most noticeable in the increasing willingness of trade partners to reference human rights standards in their trade agreements and in the growth of complementary activities such as human rights impact assessment and monitoring.

Evidence that these are having an impact ‘on the ground’ remains elusive. Nevertheless, efforts to enhance scrutiny of trade agreements from a human rights perspective, and to signal the importance of respect for human rights to a trading relationship, can still have value.

Even if causal relationships between trading arrangements and human rights impacts are difficult to establish conclusively, human rights impact assessment and subsequent monitoring activities provide valuable opportunities for stakeholders to weigh in on aspects of trade policy which are of concern.

Such processes not only help governments to realize rights of public participation, they also contribute to good governance by making it more likely that potential human rights problems will be recognized and addressed.

Turning to the agreements themselves, various ideas have been put forward on how to make these more responsive to human rights concerns.

Options mooted by EU institutions in recent years include an enhanced monitoring and enforcement role for consultative bodies established under specialized ‘trade and sustainable development’ chapters, and better mainstreaming of human rights commitments in sector-specific chapters.

However, given the political and resource-related difficulties in developing credible monitoring systems for human rights-related issues, and the unlikelihood of actual enforcement, many view this as little more than window-dressing.

For governments wanting to see real impact, ‘supply chain due diligence’ regimes pioneered by the EU in relation to timber and conflict minerals present a promising regulatory model.

These regimes seek to curb trade in products derived from, or which aggravate, human rights abuses as well as aiming to promote more responsible sourcing of products by EU importers. They create powerful incentives within partner countries to crack down on harmful practices by producers, which are bolstered further by regulations that demand more proactive human rights risk management by EU operators throughout their supply chains. Capacity-building and aid packages have been deployed to help speed up the necessary reforms.

New regulatory measures imposing mandatory human rights due diligence obligations on companies operating in a much broader range of sectors are now under consideration by the European Commission. While the role of trade-related measures in the enforcement of this new regime is still unclear, trading partners should be sure to preserve the regulatory space for sector-level and company-level initiatives such as these in future agreements.

Understanding the impact of NTPOs on investment

Professor Michael Gasiorek

Increasingly, trade policy is not just all about achieving trade-related outcomes as international trade, by definition, involves interaction with partner countries and therefore trade policy with regard to those partner countries can be used as a means to achieve ‘non-trade policy objectives’ (NTPOs).

In turn this means trade policy is also no longer just about the domestic economy but also about policies and economies in other countries – such as poorer countries achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs), concerns about practices in other countries in areas such as governance or corruption, or a desire to address broader challenges such as climate change.

But the inclusion of NTPOs in trade policy arrangements between countries also creates possible impacts on investment flows between countries. Stronger NTPO commitments could have a negative impact both on foreign direct investment (FDI) and domestic investment because the commitments increase costs for the companies involved which makes the investment less attractive.

However, NTPOs bringing progress on governance, or strengthening institutions, or giving more clarity on environmental regulations could signal a more stable and safe business environment, with production standards which create increased market access for exports – all of which may lead to increased incentives to invest.

A third possibility is that NTPOs do not have much effect either way because, although trade agreement increasingly include provisions on economic and social rights, or civil and political rights, or environmental protection – these are typically ‘best endeavour’ clauses which are frequently not binding or subject to dispute settlement, making them less likely to be implemented.

Expert

Visualizing the Data: The Evolution of Trade Tensions in Metals and Minerals Markets 18 January 2018 — 4:30PM TO 6:00PM Anonymous (not verified) 19 December 2017 Chatham House, London

Over the past decade, producer countries such as South Africa, Zambia, Indonesia, the DRC and, most recently, Tanzania have restricted exports of unprocessed precious metals, copper, nickel, cobalt and other minerals in an attempt to support, or create, downstream processing industries and jobs or increase revenues. These moves have invariably created tensions with trading partners. Research suggests that export restrictions are not the best way to achieve such policy objectives and can instead harm the producer country’s economy and undermine the functioning of international metals and minerals.

Drawing on OECD and Chatham House research on resource trade, the speaker will present analysis and data visualizations exploring the drivers of past export restrictions and their political and economic impacts. They will also consider how the drivers of ‘resource nationalist measures’ are changing, whether and where export restrictions might present strategic and economic risks in the current context, and the extent to which producer and consumer governments and international governance mechanisms are prepared to address them.

Attendance at this event is by invitation only.

Bangladesh: The Trade-Off Between Economic Prosperity and Human Rights 11 March 2020 — 1:00PM TO 2:00PM Anonymous (not verified) 28 February 2020 Chatham House | 10 St James's Square | London | SW1Y 4LE

Bangladesh’s recent gains in economic and social indices, set against its record of corruption and poor civil rights, has at times been termed the ‘Bangladesh Paradox’. Yet this label is overly simplistic; the current situation proves that these trends can coexist.

The Awami League government, in power since 2009, has increased political stability, delivered unprecedented economic and social advances, and adopted a counter-terrorism strategy to stamp out extremist groups. At the same time, it is criticized for curbing civil rights and failing to hold credible elections. However, as the two previous regimes have demonstrated, the rights situation is unlikely to improve even if the Awami League were replaced.

How did worsening rights become a feature of the state irrespective of its political dispensation? An unresolved contest between political and non-political state actors may hold the key to that puzzle. The perils of the current dispensation have recently manifested in weakening economic indicators, which jeopardize the very stability and social progress for which the country has garnered much praise.

Recent studies have suggested that innate immune responses exhibit characteristics associated with memory linked to modulations in both vertebrates and invertebrates. However, the diverse evolutionary paths taken, particularly within the invertebrate taxa, should lead to similarly diverse innate immunity memory processes. Our understanding of innate immune memory in invertebrates primarily comes from studies of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, the generality of which is unclear. Caenorhabditis elegans typically inhabits soil harboring a variety of fatal microbial pathogens; for this invertebrate, the innate immune system and aversive behavior are the major defensive strategies against microbial infection. However, their characteristics of immunological memory remains infantile. Here we discovered an immunological memory that promoted avoidance and suppressed innate immunity during reinfection with bacteria, which we revealed to be specific to the previously exposed pathogens. During this trade-off switch of avoidance and innate immunity, the chemosensory neurons AWB and ADF modulated production of serotonin and dopamine, which in turn decreased expression of the innate immunity-associated genes and led to enhanced avoidance via the downstream insulin-like pathway. Therefore, our current study profiles the immune memories during C. elegans reinfected by pathogenic bacteria and further reveals that the chemosensory neurons, the neurotransmitter(s), and their associated molecular signaling pathways are responsible for a trade-off switch between the two immunological memories.

6 July 2020

A booming tech sector can unleash pan-African trade The World Today mhiggins.drupal 31 July 2022

The new African Continental Free Trade Area must embrace hyperscale data centres, cross-border digital payments and other innovations to realise its potential.

The Africa Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) not only lays the groundwork for a single market across the continent, it can act as a driving force to unleash the full potential of the technology revolution that is under way across the African continent. 

To help achieve this, the AfCFTA must go beyond simply lowering barriers to the movement of goods and services, to what the World Bank calls an ‘FDI [foreign direct investment] deep scenario’. This requires harmonizing policies on investment, competition, intellectual property rights and e-commerce to encourage FDI at a greater scale. 

The World Bank estimates that the AfCFTA could increase income across the continent by 7 per cent by 2035 (an additional $445 billion), mainly by boosting intra-regional trade in manufactured goods and lifting approximately 40 million people from extreme poverty. Under an FDI deep scenario, the projected income growth jumps to 9 per cent by 2035, supporting 50 million people out of extreme poverty. 

The initial focus of the AfCFTA is on movement of goods and services and the associated financial flows through the establishment of the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), a technology that enables instant local currency payment across Africa without first converting to a hard currency. In addition, harmonizing policies and easing the movement of data could enable technology to accelerate the anticipated AfCFTA income growth.

Global venture capital is pouring in

There is no doubt the African tech industry is growing. In 2021, 681 African technology companies raised $5.2 billion in equity venture funding, up from $2 billion in 2019, according to Partech Partners’ annual Africa Tech Venture Capital report. 

It is understandable why the industry has attracted global venture capital. While tech businesses are often initially focused on meeting needs in their home markets, most have a strong desire to tap into the pan-African market, with its 1.3 billion consumers across 54 countries and a combined GDP of $3.4 trillion. This in turn should attract global venture capital to invest in Africa. 

The AfCFTA has created a framework for technology-led companies to scale across the continent in a way that will impact digital infrastructure, logistics, energy and much else. For example, Africa’s hyperscale data centre capacity would benefit from the ability to locate centres in the lowest cost jurisdiction with the best energy availability and to use that to power cloud storage across the continent.

Yet various regulatory constraints, including the desire for each state to own its population’s data on local servers, prevent that. As a result, African data centres are less competitive than those in America and China. 

Similarly, logistics and other sectors would be transformed if the information on goods in transit, such as digital customs documentation, could move easily across borders while being tracked across all 54 countries. Financial services would also benefit from the ability to pay across borders in a low-cost, frictionless way.

Fintech companies should be encouraged to build technology solutions linking to PAPSS and other initiatives to accelerate the adoption-of-use cases that PAPSS supports – such as intra-Africa instant payment, embedded finance and remittances services.

AfCFTA may also unlock mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity among African and international firms. Technology companies are using M&A to enter new markets, as the international payments platform Stripe did when it acquired the Nigerian business Paystack, and the payments business MFS Africa did when it took over the fintech start-up Baxi. 

Governments and regulators must support innovation

Given the difficulty of a country-by-country organic growth strategy across Africa, M&A is likely to increase in various technology sectors over the next few years. With the anticipated ease of doing business that the AfCFTA could facilitate, we are likely to witness further welcome consolidation, creating larger corporates that create more jobs and increase tax revenues. 

To unlock the benefits that technology will bring, governments and regulators need to play a supportive role in encouraging innovation. They will need to ensure the appropriate consumer protections are in place without stifling creativity through regulation, inefficiencies or rent-seeking. 

At the same time, governments and regulators should not permit themselves to be held to ransom by dominant incumbents, such as banks and mobile operators in the fintech space, at the expense of stifling technology companies looking to disrupt their respective industries. 

Only then will the AfCFTA allow Africa to benefit from its tech potential. 

Risana Zitha writes this article in a personal capacity

Tackling Illegal Wildlife Trade in Africa: Economic Incentives and Approaches Research paper sysadmin 5 October 2018

Combating illegal wildlife trade and further pursuing conservation-development models could help generate considerable economic benefits for African countries, while ensuring the long-term preservation of Africa’s wealth of natural capital.

Summary

• The illegal wildlife trade (IWT) significantly impacts African economies by destroying and corroding natural, human and social capital stocks. This hinders the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and has an impact on national budgets. Illicit financial flows from IWT deny revenue to governments where legal wildlife product trade exists and perpetuate cash externalization. IWT diverts national budgets away from social or development programmes, increases insecurity and threatens vulnerable populations.
• In expanding wildlife economies and pursuing conservation-driven development models, governments can protect their citizens, derive revenue from wildlife products, and establish world class tourism offerings. The illegal exploitation of wildlife is often due to a failure to enforce rights over those resources, where rights are unclearly defined or not fully exercised. Southern African countries have defined these rights in various ways, contributing to regional differences in conservation practices and the socio-economic benefits derived from wildlife resources. Combating IWT is an important step towards allowing legitimate business and communities to develop livelihoods that incentivize stewardship and connect people to conservation.
• The Southern African Development Community (SADC) has several framework policies for the establishment of transfrontier conservation areas (TFCAs). These promote local stewardship across multiple land-use areas to conserve biodiversity and increase the welfare and socioeconomic development of rural communities. Private-sector partnerships also increase skills transfer, improve access to investment finance, and expand economic opportunities, including through the promotion of local procurement. The economic benefits of TFCAs extend beyond tourism.
• The economic value of African ecosystems is often under-recognized because they remain unquantified, partly due to the lack of available data on the broader economic costs of IWT. Improved monitoring and evaluation with key performance indicators would help governments and citizens to appreciate the economic value of combating IWT.

Delivering Sustainable Food and Land Use Systems: The Role of International Trade Research paper sysadmin 20 September 2019

This paper explores a set of core trade-related issues affecting the food and land use system, and proposes constructive ways forward in reconfiguring the global trading system towards delivering a more sustainable and healthy diet for all.

• Meeting future global food security requirements is not just about quantity; it is also about meeting growing needs in a way that safeguards human as well as planetary health. But national priorities and policies often remain out of sync with aspirations for more sustainable and healthy food systems.
• International trade and trade policies play an ambiguous role in the current food system. With 80 per cent of the world’s population depending on imports to meet at least part of their food and nutritional requirements, trade has a unique function in offsetting imbalances between supply and demand. However, in the absence of effective regulatory frameworks or pricing frameworks that internalize environmental, social or health costs, trade can exacerbate and globalize challenges associated with food production and land use trends such as deforestation, land degradation, greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss and the shift to unhealthy diets.
• Over the last two decades, trade in agricultural products (excluding intra-EU flows) has more than tripled in value, to reach $1.33 trillion. The geography of global food trade flows has also shifted, primarily towards South–South trade, which now accounts for roughly a quarter of total agricultural trade flows. The nature of global trade has changed drastically, with traditional exports such as wheat and coffee growing slowly at around 2 per cent per year, while products such as palm oil, fruit juice, soft drinks and other processed products have grown at 8 per cent or more annually.
• This overall increase in trade in agricultural products raises questions about the growing utilization of resources, such as water or soil nutrients, that are embedded in those products through production and processing. Trade itself also causes negative environmental impacts, starting with greenhouse gas emissions associated with transport and storage. If the environmental cost associated with production and trade is not reflected in the final price of goods, trade may accelerate the depletion of resources or their unsustainable use.
• It is critical to ensure that trade policy options pursued by producing and consuming countries alike will support a transition to more sustainable and healthier food and land use systems. The first step in addressing trade-related food systems challenges must involve rebuilding trust among policy actors. There is a need for new spaces for informal dialogue among actors, and ‘soft’ governance mechanisms that can help rebuild consensus on the best ways forward. Meeting these challenges also requires an appreciation of the complex interactions between sectoral policies (e.g. on water, land, food, etc.) and their multiple interfaces with trade policies.
• Conditioning the use of subsidies on their sustainability and/or health impacts encourages the delivery of essential public goods in ways that are consistent with sustainability and health goals. A first step therefore is the removal of perverse incentives (e.g. subsidies encouraging the overuse of fertilizers or pesticides or the overproduction of certain commodities, as well as certain biofuels subsidies) and replacing them with market-correcting subsidies.
• Trade facilitation measures for fruits and vegetables that are aimed at easing transit at the border, by cutting unnecessary bureaucracy and reducing waiting times, can improve their availability, reduce costs and improve food quality and safety for consumers. Similarly, measures aimed at improving sustainable cold storage and upgrading value chains can support better diets and consumption by increasing the availability of fresh produce on markets, especially in developing countries.
• A global food stamps programme developed through the G20 and facilitated by the UN’s food agencies could address purchasing power imbalances and tackle malnutrition in developing countries. If carefully designed, such ‘safety net’ schemes can not only contribute to improving calorific intakes but also help deliver more balanced and healthier diets. Careful attention must be given to how such a scheme would work in practice, building on experience to date with similar initiatives.
• Integrating the notion of sustainable food and inputs trade in the post-2020 global biodiversity framework can help to deliver more sustainable and healthier food and land use systems. This could be achieved by likeminded countries introducing a set of goals or targets aimed at mitigating the role of trade in placing indirect pressure on biodiversity, and to encourage trade in biodiversity-based products including natural ingredients produced ethically and following sustainability principles and criteria.
• An SDG-oriented agenda for agricultural trade is needed. It could be formed by countries seeking to remove perverse incentives, guaranteeing a safe harbour for market-correcting measures, clarifying existing rules and establishing plurilateral negotiations among subsets of the WTO membership, or sectoral approaches, to address specific challenges.
• Greenhouse gas emissions resulting from trade need to be addressed. Governments could seek to achieve this through ensuring the carbon neutrality of existing and new trade deals, either by connecting carbon markets among contracting parties or by developing joint initiatives to tax international maritime and air transport emissions.

The future of global trade: Beyond ‘peak globalization’? 23 November 2022 — 11:00AM TO 12:00PM Anonymous (not verified) 17 October 2022 Online

Is globalization in retreat?

The COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s war on Ukraine have highlighted how vulnerable international trade is. But, even before these recent shocks, rising protectionism in major economies around the world and concerns about the environment have weighed heavily on trade.

According to some key measures, the globalization trend appears to have slowed. But is ‘peak globalization’ a reality or a myth? What are the major phases of globaliszation and what might come next? The answer differs between trade in goods, services, capital, technology, data and people. And whether the future is a more integrated or fragmented world economy also depends on politics and the stability of the international order.

Key questions to be tackled at this event includes:

• How do recent shocks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s war on Ukraine, change globalization? 

• What are the key indicators for the global integration of major economies?

• Will there be a split between a US and China-dominated ’trading sphere of influence’?

• Could trade in services offer ‘globalization’ a new phase of rapid growth?

• What impact will technology continue to have on global trade and the future of globalization?

As with all members events, questions from the audience drive the conversation.

The discussion is part of the Chatham House Global Trade Policy Forum. The Global Trade Policy Forum is supported by founding partner AIG, associate partner Boston Consulting Group and supporting partners Clifford Chance LLP, Diageo PLC and UPS.

Read the transcript. 

Taking Stock of Turkey's Trade Policy 11 September 2018 — 5:00PM TO 6:15PM Anonymous (not verified) 23 August 2018 Chatham House | 10 St James's Square | London | SW1Y 4LE

As the only large economy outside of the EU with a customs union agreement, Turkey has a unique trade policy. Amid domestic economic challenges, Turkey’s trade minister, Ruhsar Pekcan, will discuss prospects for upgrading the EU-Turkey customs union. She will also discuss relations between the UK and Turkey and outline strategies for post-Brexit trade.

Attendance at this event is by invitation only.

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Dopamine (DA) and norepinephrine (NE) have been repeatedly implicated in neuropsychiatric vulnerability, in part via their roles in mediating the decision-making processes. Although two neuromodulators share a synthesis pathway and are coactivated under states of arousal, they engage in distinct circuits and modulatory roles. However, the specific role of each neuromodulator in decision-making, in particular the exploration–exploitation tradeoff, remains unclear. Revealing how each neuromodulator contributes to exploration–exploitation tradeoff is important in guiding mechanistic hypotheses emerging from computational psychiatric approaches. To understand the differences and overlaps of the roles of these two catecholamine systems in regulating exploration, a direct comparison using the same dynamic decision-making task is needed. Here, we ran male and female mice in a restless two-armed bandit task, which encourages both exploration and exploitation. We systemically administered a nonselective DA antagonist (flupenthixol), a nonselective DA agonist (apomorphine), a NE beta-receptor antagonist (propranolol), and a NE beta-receptor agonist (isoproterenol) and examined changes in exploration within subjects across sessions. We found a bidirectional modulatory effect of dopamine on exploration. Increasing dopamine activity decreased exploration and decreasing dopamine activity increased exploration. The modulatory effect of beta-noradrenergic receptor activity on exploration was mediated by sex. Reinforcement learning model parameters suggested that dopamine modulation affected exploration via decision noise and norepinephrine modulation affected exploration via sensitivity to outcome. Together, these findings suggested that the mechanisms that govern the exploration–exploitation transition are sensitive to changes in both catecholamine functions and revealed differential roles for NE and DA in mediating exploration.

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