Wishing a Merry Christmas to those who celebrate! The ARTNeT Secretariat extends warm season’s greetings to all ARTNeT partners, associate partners, members and participants in ARTNeT activities and would like to thank all contributors for their valued inputs in 2018. We wish all of you a peaceful and joyous holiday season and we look forward to another year of successful collaboration under ARTNeT. We hope you will achieve all your personal and professional goals set for 2019!

The secretariat would wish to remind all ARTNeT members and partners of the opportunity to showcase your upcoming publications and events through ARTNeT channels including this newsletter, the ARTNeT website and social media.

ARTNeT Secretariat welcomes its 74th institutional member, Business School, University of New England (UNE), Australia. The UNE is a regionally based university in New South Wales, Australia. UNE Business School offers degrees in agricultural and resource economics, accounting, agribusiness, business and economics. The School faculties make significant contributions to international trade and development programs through their teaching, research, and consultancy.

The focal point to ARTNeT is Prof. Mahinda Siriwardana. ARTNeT Secretariat looks forward to the future collaboration in trade research and training with UNE Business School!

Organized by the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation in collaboration with UN agencies and other partners, the Expo has featured documented best practices from member States, the United Nations system, private-sector enterprises and civil society organizations. It provided a powerful platform for all development actors and stakeholders to showcase Southern development solutions, celebrate South-South and triangular cooperation successes, share knowledge and lessons learned, explore new avenues for collaboration, and initiate new partnership efforts. ARTNeT has showcased its 14 year experience on supporting research that fuels South-South cooperation. 

For more information about the Expo please visit here. 

The year 2018 marks the sixth anniversary of IIFT’s biannual conference on Empirical Issues in International Trade and Finance (EIITF). The EIITF conference has emerged as a platform for bringing together young minds and keen researchers to discuss, reflect and examine new ideas and understand different dimensions on current and emerging trends in the area of International Trade and Finance. This year ARTNeT/ESCAP organised the Policy Forum on Trade, Technology and Global Value Chains. The speakers brought out various issues including challenges for SMEs, technology absorption, skill development and fear of automation. 

For more information about the conference from our contributor IIFT please visit here. 

Douglas Irwin's book was reviewed by Wenjia Cao, Manyun Liu, and Weizhao Sun. The review follows the same structure as Clashing Over Commerce, which chronologically divides the US trade history into three periods: revenue, restriction, and reciprocity. The main objectives of these three eras were: raising revenue, restricting imports to protect domestic producers from foreign competition and opening domestic markets to commerce with other countries through reciprocity. Here, the reviewers also discuss the significant events in each period to give readers a demonstration of US trade policy in practice.

For the full text please visit here. 

This short book responds to seven common objections to free trade corresponding to the seven sections of this review. It successfully points out the fallacies underlying those objections by introducing theories of free trade and providing examples and statistics correspondingly. The review summarizes some concepts and conclusions that the reviewer found the most important and interesting.

Since the purpose of this book is to counter misconceptions about protectionism, the book emphasizes conceptual aspects more than quantitative studies. It clarifies relevant economic concepts and trade theories in the body of each chapter. In the essays following each chapter, applications of those concepts and theories are collected in the form of case studies or extensions.

For the full text by Bangyu He please visit here. 

The ESCAP and the World Bank joined hands to develop a common standard methodology for calculating comprehensive international trade costs and provide the research and policy community with a global reference. The current version includes data from 1995 to 2016 for over 180 countries. In addition to maintaining the ESCAP-World Bank trade cost dataset, ESCAP also issued a Value-added trade cost database, based on the OECD-WTO TiVA data and which includes trade cost in services.

To access the database please visit here. 

The conference by our member CWS is aimed at discussing theoretical and empirical research on emerging areas in ecommerce and its linkages with services trade and investment. It intends to invite research papers investigating new opportunities, issues and challenges on these subjects. The papers may examine growth and trend in e-commerce in India and globally, FDI in e-commerce, regulation of e-commerce activities, e-commerce and trade agreements including WTO and FTAs, e-commerce and logistics, payments systems, Fintech and Block Chain Technology, Cryptocurrencies etc. Papers on any other
issue pertaining to the theme of the conference are also welcome.

For more information please visit here. 

Our partner APEC is the international forum for facilitating economic growth, cooperation, trade and investment in the Asia-Pacific region. The Policy Support Unit (PSU) provides professional and tailor-made research, analysis and evidence-based policy suggestions to assist APEC’s 21-member economies in their deliberations and decisions.

Full-time internship opportunities now exist for existing students who are enrolled in a Masters program in Economics, Public Policy or Statistics or in a similar undergraduate program at the senior level.

For more information please visit here. 

Our partner ASEAN Secretariat is inviting qualified ASEAN Nationals to apply for the position of Assistant Director Analysis and Monitoring on Finance and Socio-Economic Issues Division (AMFSED) funded by the ASEAN Regional Support from the EU (ARISE) Plus Programme.

For more information please visit here. 

This study first authored by Radika Kumar from our member University of South Pacific, Fiji, provides possible implications of the fisheries subsidies as a trade policy tool for market access and its effectiveness in achieving the overall sustainable development goals. To examine the effectiveness of subsidies in fisheries negotiations, the study focuses on the global supply and demand side of the fisheries resources from the perspective of the fish resource holders and the fishing resource capacity. The analysis considers budgetary support in fisheries, the vessel capacity (tonnage), the fish development technologies and the total marine catch processing, to indicate the demand for extraction of the fish resources. The supply of the fish resources is determined by the regions with major fishing areas and the licenses issued for fishing. Using both the market demand and supply for fisheries resource extraction, the study examines the effectiveness of subsidies as a trade policy tool to attain the overall sustainable development goals. Based on the analysis, certain policy strategies follows, which are important for countries to consider before the elimination of fisheries subsidies at the WTO.

For the full journal article please visit here. 

Our member SAWTEE organized the Tenth South Asia Economic Summit (SAES) in Kathmandu on 14-16 November 2017 with the theme 'Deepening Economic Integration for Inclusive and Sustainable Development'. This publication is the collection of the papers presented at the Summit. The papers covered a variety of topics, including the role of SAARC Observers, trade, investment, Sustainable Development Goals, climate change, e-trade readiness, disaster risk reduction, WTO issues, trade facilitation and connectivity, migration and remittances, intellectual property with regard to plant genetic resources, rural economies and small and medium-sized enterprises, energy cooperation, regional value chains, and data for economic measurement. 

For the full publication please visit here. 

As the world leans in to the United Nations adoption of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, our partner JustJobs Network internationally releases its signatory volume for 2018, People on the Move - Advancing the Discourse on Migration and Jobs.

Research such as this can serve as a foundation for discourse on migration and jobs based on facts. Findings from the volume can help outline priorities and next steps for policies that could improve the lives of migrants and their communities.

For the full publication please visit here. 

Small and marginal farmers are not the real benefi ciaries of loan waivers. In the year following loan waivers, small farmers lose out on three counts: lower access to formal loans, falling agricultural revenue because of higher informal loan costs, and falling agricultural productivity. Instead, supply-side interventions could make a real difference in farmers’ lives as a long-term alternative to loan waivers.

For the full commentary by Nilanjan Banik please visit here. 

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The ARTNeT Secretariat welcomes submissions of policy briefs, working papers, book reports, research reports, and book reviews by ARTNeT members, partners and collaborators. For any submission to be considered, the editorial 'Guidelines for Submissions to the ARTNeT Working Papers Series' must be adhered to.

If you are an ARTNeT member, partner or collaborator and would like to publicise your publications, research or events in the next newsletter, please e-mail us at artnetontrade@un.org.