Ali Dadkhah MILE 12

Ali Dadkhah is a practising lawyer and a member of the British Columbia Bar.  He obtained a Masters in International Law and Economics in 2012 from the World Trade Institute, University of Bern, Switzerland. He has expertise in trade and economic development, with a particular focus on the interface between law and economics. In particular his work has focused on Canada’s domestic service regulations, innovation and international trade and investment, including the development of better metrics to assess the impact of Canada’s trade agreements on services and innovation outcomes. Of particular relevance to the present project, Ali developed the analysis of the impact of various trade agreements on non-tariff measures affecting trade by coding the agreements against the OECD’s Trade Facilitation Indicators (TFI) for goods, the OECD’s Services Trade Restrictiveness Index (STRI) for services, and the Foreign Direct Investment Restrictiveness (FDIR) index for FDI. Ali has worked as a legal expert with Ciuriak Consulting in projects with Singapore and the European Union and co-authored quantitative assessments of prospective trade agreements; including of the Canada-Korea free trade agreement, the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), commissioned by the European Commission, and Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). These recent studies introduce new methods to translate negotiated text into quantifiable trade impacts based on exact coding of the agreed legal texts against established indices of trade and investment protection.