WTO Technical Assistance

Speaker biography
Maarten Smeets is head of section at the Institute for Training and Technical Co-operation (ITTC) in the WTO, Geneva, responsible for partnerships, coordinating WTO's field based trade capacity building programs, the WTO Chairs Program and WTO's Internship Programs, bringing annually 40 high level government officials for 10 months to the WTO. Before, he has worked in the Trade Directorate of the OECD (Paris) and at the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Netherlands. He holds a PhD from the Faculty of Law at Maastricht University, a master's degree in economics and international trade from Tilburg University, a post-doctoral degree from the Graduate Institute in Geneva and a diploma from the Ecole Nationale Nationale d'Administration (ENA), Paris. He is a senior visiting fellow at Clingendael Institute (Den Haag, Netherlands) and a fellow from Salzburg Seminar (Austria). He is a frequent guest lecturer at universities in the Netherlands, China and Russia. He has published in leading journals, contributed to and co-edited books on international trade. He is on the board of various institutions, including the IMF led Joint Vienna Institute (JVI).