"The Sciences Po-Tsinghua Initiative for Public Policy"

Title: Water and the WTO: Don’t kill the messenger

Speaker: Professor Patrick Messerlin
                 Groupe d’Economie Mondiale, Sciences Po, Paris

Host: Professor Richard Balme

          Centre d'Etudes Europeennes, Sciences Po

          School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University

Date: 5:30pm, Friday, April 8th, 2011

Venue: 302, School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University

Presentation of the seminar:

The seminar will look at the crucial question of how to make a better use of our water resources which will be under increasing stress (within many countries and in the whole world) during the two coming decades.  It will focus on three points.  First is how trade analysis shows the beneficial aspect of a more integrated international trade in water and how trade and water issues can be mutually supportive.  Second, two questions will be examined:  do we need a specific international agreement for improving the way we “trade water”;  do we need specific international agreements for producing water in sustainable quantity and quality?  Third, the presentation will make a parallel between the trade-and-water issue and the climate change-and-water issue.

Speaker’s Bio: 

Patrick Messerlin is professor of economics at Sciences Po, and director, Groupe d’Economie Mondiale at Sciences Po (GEM).  He specializes in international trade policy and regulatory reforms.  His current research deals with WTO issues, EC commercial policy, services liberalization and the associated “Better regulations” initiatives.

In 2001-2002, Prof. Messerlin was a special advisor to Mike Moore, WTO Director General.  In 2003-2005, he also served as co-chair, with Ernesto Zedillo, Director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals Task Force on Trade for Development. Since June 2008, he is serving as co-chair, with Ernest Zedillo, of the joint World Bank & UK Department for International Development Task Force on Global Finance and Trade Architecture.  He is serving as the Chair of the Global Trade Council 2010-2011 of the World Economic Forum (Davos).

Prof. Messerlin is the author of many books, most recently Measuring the Costs of Protection in Europe: European Commercial Policy in the 2000s (Peterson Institute for International Economics 2001) and Europe after the No Votes (Institute of Economic Affairs 2006).  He has also written more than a hundred articles for professional journals.