Trade Policy and the Ideas Based Economy
Trade and innovation hang together. They spur growth in productivity and value added – and generally modernise entire economies from bottom-up. But they are also contested, especially by those that prefers producing comfortably behind barriers to competition and innovation. Countries with high border barriers therefore tend to have high behind-the-border barriers preventing not just trade but investment, innovation, and market-based technology transfers, too. India is a case in point: its comparatively high tariffs have for decades prevented India’s integration in the world economy – and its current regulatory practice now erodes India’s capacity to foster innovation and grow its ideas based economy.
You are cordially invited to a conference on trade policy and the ideas based economy, with keynote speaker Robert Shapiro, adviser to Barack Obama and several other U.S. Presidents, and the former Undersecretary of Commerce under Bill Clinton. The conference will chart new ideas for how innovation can become front and centre in trade policy – and it will feature a case study, EU-India trade relations, on how trade policy can boost economic growth by focusing on policies causing friction in the ideas based economy.
Conference Programme
09:30 Registration – welcome coffee
10:00 Introduction
10:10 The Ideas Based Economy and Trade
Robert Shapiro is the Co-founder and Chairman of Sonecon, a boutique advisory firm in the United States. An advisor to Barack Obama and several U.S. President and Presidential candidates, Dr. Shapiro was the Undersecretary of Commerce in the second Clinton Administration.
10:45 The Innovation Content in EU Trade: Comparing EU and US Trade with India
Fredrik Erixon is a Director and co-Founder of ECIPE
11:10 Coffee/tea break
11:30 Panel:
Maria Badia i Cutchet is a Member of the European Parliament’s International Trade Committee, where she is the Rapporteur on EU-India FTA
Sebastien Gagnon-Messier is the Head of International Health Care and Public Policy at Bayer HealthCare.
Nicholas Hodac is a Governmental Programme Executive at IBM.
Signe Ratso is Director of Trade Strategy, Analysis and Market Access at the European Commission’s DG Trade.
Peter Witt is the Head of Siemens’ Representation in Brussels and previously served as Germany’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the EU.
12:45 End
Location
