CEPS was a member of the consortium led by the Gulf Research Council. The project’s main objectives were threefold.
1) It aimed to enhance public and well as professional knowledge and understanding of the European Union, its policies and institutions, among GCC citizens.
2) It strove to strengthen reflection and debate about EU-GCC relations and contribute to the future of policy-making between the two regions.
3) Finally, it sought to make closer links between the EU and the GCC through the dissemination of information on the EU.

As part of a consortium led by GTZ, CEPS prepared a study paper pertaining to “Policies to encourage FDI” which covered the following elements:
• Review trends of FDI into the Kingdom including main characteristics such as sectors of concentration, transfer of know-how, etc.
• How can policies be improved to maximize FDI benefits?
• How can FDI be attracted in new sectors and higher value added activities?

CEPS is a member of consortium led by LSE Enterprise and which also includes University of Maastricht, University of Parma, Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft, Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and Trinity College Dublin. As part of this contract CEPS has contributed to a study on EU-Korea FTA.

 The project will consider the academic and policy concerns that arise from the increasing importance of the market service sector and the crucial role it appears to play for differential economic performance between industrialised countries. It will do so through examining developments in productivity and its drivers within market services, linkages between services and manufacturing industries, innovation in delivery and types of services and international relationships.

While there is a broad empirical literature on the impact of trade on environment, the literature on the impact of environmental regulations on trade flows is relatively scarce, very heterogeneous and presents mixed results. The innovative feature of this paper is its attempt to estimate, in a gravity setting, the overall impact on 14 EU countries’ bilateral exports of three major Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs).

Core issues

Relations between China and the West have been difficult for some time.
Recently, however, one issue in particular has made the headlines: rare earths. Vital for the production of low-carbon products such as hybrid cars and wind turbines, consumer goods and sensitive military hardware like cruise missiles and smart bombs, rare earths are indispensable for high-tech industries and emerging technologies.

The Southeast Europe (SEE) region comprises a group of countries with a common objective, and prospect, to become members of the European Union (EU). To achieve the goal of EU membership, these countries have pursued closer integration with the EU as well as with each other. In December 2006, the SEE countries, and Moldova, signed the Central European Free Trade Agreement (CEFTA), a comprehensive free trade agreement that aims to fully liberalize trade in the region as well as to achieve greater cooperation in a number of trade-related areas.

EVENT POSTPONED

Analysis of the possible content, economic impact and feasibility of the EU and Ukraine making a Free Trade Agreement. The team first reviewed available economic evidence on the likely impact of ‘simple’ or ‘deep’ free trade, from which it was apparent that the former would have little impact, whereas the latter could be a major and indispensable component of a strategy to get Ukraine onto a sustainable high growth path.

This study is a qualitative analysis of a potential free trade agreement between the EU and South Korea conducted from January to April 2007, under a contract from the Directorate General for Trade of the European Commission. The study aims to provide a basis for the negotiations that started in May 2007 between the EU and South Korea. As such, it is an in-depth examination of the extent to which EU exporters face non-tariff barriers to trade with Korea.

This paper argues that there are significant potential economic gains to be obtained from an EU-Canada Free Trade Agreement. The evolution of trade between the US and Canada following the signing of CUSFTA in 1989 offers a good illustration of how trade might increase after an EU-Canada FTA, as the patterns and levels of protection between the EU and Canada today are very similar to the protection that existed between the US and Canada in 1989.

Last year the European Union began negotiating free trade agreements (FTAs) with South Korea, India and ASEAN. These negotiations are important because they are among the EU’s first round of new generation FTAs as called for in the Global Europe: Competing in the World communiqué. They are also important because if and when the agreements are signed, they will be the EU’s first bilateral FTAs in the region.

This book examines the repercussions of the EU’s agricultural policies and its regional, bilateral and multilateral trade agreements. It presents the analyses and findings of the European Network of Agricultural and Rural Policy Research Institutes (ENARPRI), a unique collaboration of experts from across the EU. Their contributions to this volume focus on trade flows and economic development, exploring how the agreements affect the EU and the other countries and regions involved.