Events

The EU and the US account for 40% of global trade in services, and one of the main rationale of TTIP was the prospects of raising the standards in services liberalisation. The recent news reports seem to suggest that any progress is yet to be delivered – despite the strong interests for comprehensible results on both sides of the Atlantic.

Economic value is increasingly produced in global cities that can benefit from specialisation and other factors of grow. Similarly, global cities are increasingly vectors of global trade and commerce – the interface between a larger region and the world market. But we seldom speak about cities in trade policy – or think about cities as economic entities with special interests in trade policy.

Europe needs new policies to boost growth and curb rising extremism, argues Philippe Legrain in a new powerful book. While EU policymakers may believe they have solved the crisis, in fact they misdiagnosed it and made it worse. The eurozone remains saddled with broken banks, crushing debts, feeble productivity growth and low investment. Many people have lost faith in the competence and motives of politicians and EU technocrats, while support for the EU has plunged to all-time lows, leaving the door open to extremists and charlatans. That's why we desperately need a European Spring: economic and political renewal.

The new Beijing leadership has set out an agenda for economic reforms. As China’s economic growth slows down there is now greater expectations on the government to actually deliver needed reforms. But the reform agenda is neither new nor uncontroversial. Much talked about in the past years, intentions to bring forward the reform agenda, especially to open up for more competition in China, have stumbled in the face of domestic opposition. Is this time different?

The demands on Europe's healthcare systems are increasing while the fiscal resources to finance them are scarce. While the economic crisis in Europe have imposed bigger fiscal constraints on healthcare policy, the challenges about the financial sustainability of current healthcare policies have been building up for quite some time. How big are these challenges - and what do they tell us about the future of healthcare policy?

“East is East and West is West, and never the two shall meet”, wrote Rudyard Kipling. Is this true also for international economic policy and security policy – that they are so different from each other that they never can meet?

Global trade negotiations are once again focusing on services liberalisation after a few decades of detours. The current wave of FTAs – notably with TPP, TTIP, TISA and EU-Japan – are driven by prospects of services and investment market access and next-generation disciplines.

The four modes of services have been a fixture of trade negotiations and research, ever since their conception during the Uruguay round. Since then, the developments of servification, trade in value-added, and technology have changed how services are actually traded, and blurred the line between services and goods.

Despite China's economic upgrade, the share of services in the Chinese economy or employment is still similar to some least-developing countries. Many doubt that employment, growth or welfare can be boosted in China without substantive reforms of the services markets.

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.