International trade, and in particular TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade and Partnership agreement between the EU and the US, has recently become a hotly debated policy field in the EU, juxtaposing a coalition of EU institutions and the corporate sector against a large coalition of civil society organisations. TTIP stands out as the prime example of new generation free trade agreements aiming at deep economic integration. Besides tariff elimination, its primary aim is to focus on a very comprehensive set of regulatory issues and rules, with a view to dismantling and harmonizing these in areas such as agriculture, food safety, product and technical standards, sectoral regulations in services, the protection of intellectual property rights, and government procurement. In addition, investment liberalization and protection are central issues, with the proposed investor-to-state-dispute-settlement mechanism (ISDS) being particularly controversial.

The EU Trade Policy Conference wants to contribute to the trade policy debate by promoting (i) a trans- and interdisciplinary analysis of the current trade regime and policies in the EU and its likely economic, social and political impacts, and by facilitating (ii) a multi-stakeholder debate on alternative conceptualizations of trade and trade policy in the EU.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:

• Stephen Gill is Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science at York University, Toronto, Canada.
• Sheila Jasanoff is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School.

PLENARY SPEAKERS (in alphabetical order):

• Frank Ackerman is an environmental economist who has written widely on energy, climate change, trade, and related issues.
• Marija Bartl is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Amsterdam.
• Penny Clarke is the EPSU Deputy General Secretary since 2014.
• Ferdi De Ville is assistant professor in European Union Studies at Ghent University.
• Jean-Christophe Graz is Professor of international relations at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Historiques et Internationales of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.
• John Hilary is Executive Director of War on Want.
• Manuel Pérez-Rocha is an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in Washington and an Associate of the Transnational Institute (TNI) in Amsterdam.
• Christoph Scherrer, an economist and political scientist, is professor for “Globalisation and Politics” at the University of Kassel.
• Sabine Stephan was born in 1967. 1988-1996 she studied media and film studies and political sci-ence at the Free University of Berlin, degree: Magister Artium (1996).
• Alexandra Strickner is an economist, co-founder and current President of Attac Austria.
  Rudi von Arnim received a PhD in Economics from the New School for Social Research in 2008. Since 2009, he is Assistant Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, UT.

Read more about the speakers.

The conference is organized by ÖFSE – Austrian Foundation for Development Research, in cooperation with the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy and the EuroMemorandum Group.