PITAD, WTI and ITC take stock of a joint partnership agreement on trade-related technical assistance

Senior representatives from the Pakistan Institute of Trade and Development (PITAD), the World Trade Institute (WTI) and the International Trace Centre (ITC) met on 20 January 2012 at WTI in Bern, Switzerland, to review progress made during the first year of a partnership agreement between the WTI and PITAD. The partnership agreement, facilitated by ITC in the context of Component 1 of the TRTA II programme, aims at strengthening the institutional capacity of PITAD through the direct support of WTI, a world leader in training and research in the fields of trade and investment regulation. WTI support is aimed at enabling PITAD (supported by other local training and research institutes) to build-up its capacity for delivering graduate-level training modules and producing cutting-edge research. An important aspect of the partnership agreement is the development of training modules under the guidance of WTI mentors which will become part of a joint WTI-PITAD certificate course on International Trade Law and Commercial Diplomacy deployed in Pakistan.

 Participants attending the January meeting agreed that progress in implementing the partnership agreement had been sound. They agreed that a similar process should be undertaken in 2012. In this regard, a further seven trade policy modules were agreed to be developed by Pakistani Master Trainers with the support of leading international experts drawn from the ranks of WTI faculty and its global network. The modules to be developed in 2012, notably through face to face interaction between Mentors and Master Trainers at the WTI in Bern in August-September are as follows (see names of designated WTI Mentors below):

• Trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights (Dr. Henning Grosse Ruse- Khan, Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law, Munich)
• Trade remedies (Dr. Gustav Brink, Trade Remedies Unlimited, Johannesburg, South Africa)
• Dispute settlement (Dr. Christian Haeberli, World Trade Institute, University of Bern)
• Investment law and policy (Mr. Roberto Echandi, World Trade Institute, University of Bern)
• Trade, environment and climate change (Dr. Arthur Appleton, AppletonLuff, Geneva)
• The economics and policy of non-tariff measures (Prof. Olivier Cadot, University of Lausanne)
• Assessing the effects of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs): measurement methodologies (Dr. Anirudh Shingal, World Trade Institute, University of Bern)