News and analysis on trade policy in Europe
Tuesday, April 29, 2025
The European Commission is officially releasing a long-announced new international trade policy strategy today. To those who are closely following the European Union’s trade policy there is little that is properly surprising or genuinely new in the text, but it confirms the continent’s shift towards a more defensive approach to …
Negotiations among a subset of members of the World Trade Organization in the area of ‘services domestic regulation’ are one of the few initiatives launched in Buenos Aires in December 2017 that could come to fruition this year.
The European Union’s global trade in goods dropped overall in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. But the EU’s legendary trade surplus held up well – and so did trade with China. This contrasts with a dramatic drop in EU trade with the United States and …
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to head WTO The World Trade Organization’s General Council is meeting today (Monday 15 February) to take a final decision on the nomination of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to become the next director-general of the organisation. The former World Bank executive was the consensus choice among WTO members in a …
The Chilean government wants to finalise a series of trade agreement negotiations it has in the pipeline in the coming five to six months as it prepares for the end of the Sebastián Piñera presidency in 2021. Among the dozen deals for Santiago to seal, there is an upgrade to …
Now that the European Union has inked an investment agreement with China it needs to take a big-picture geopolitical approach to the rest of the Asian region and a forward-looking approach to transatlantic relations, argues Reinhard Bütikofer in an interview with Borderlex.
A warning, this column lets off some steam…
This has been a very odd week, strangely busy with little actually happening in terms of decisions. The EU is preparing the ground for many further developments. Some more on this below.
The expectation in WTO circles is that today’s announcement by South Korea’s candidate to the post of director-general that she is dropping out of the race paves the way for the membership’s favourite, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, to become the next boss at the secretariat in Geneva. But let’s not quite expect …
The Korean candidate to become the next World Trade Organization’s director-general has withdrawn from the leadership race.
