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 to ARTNeT events and would like to thank all contributors for their valued inputs this year. We wish you a peaceful and joyous time and look forward to another year of successful collaboration with you! We hope you will achieve all your personal and professional goals set for 2018!

The secretariat also 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.

The new ARTNeT website was launched at the ARTNeT Symposium on Preferential Trade Agreements and Inclusive Trade on 14 December in Bangkok. The new website features a modern, user-friendly design and acts as an information repository providing the ARTNeT Community with latest information on members & partners, events, publications, and relevant databases. In particular, the new platform adds the option to search for ARTNeT working papers and other types of publications on a particular topic of interest. Please visit the new site and please do not hesitate to share your feedback with us!

A preview of the Asia-Pacific Trade Indicators Portal (APTIP) is now online! APTIP is a web-based portal that enables visualizing trade-related data from a spectrum of sources, including ESCAP, UN Comtrade, the World Bank and the IMF. By selecting one or multiple (economic, social and environmental) indicators of interest and one or more Asia-Pacific economies, a bar chart, trend graph or scatter plot can be dynamically generated. The data visualization can then be exported in various formats.

Please try it out and create a graph with APTIP - as we are still working on improving this portal, please do share with us your thoughts and feedback!

The Belt Road Initiative (BRI) suggested by China’s President Xi Jinping provides an ambitious vision encouraging a new level of cooperation among countries along several economic corridors spanning most of the Asian economies member of ESCAP. This paper reviews the trade and trade facilitation situation of economies along each of the corridors and analyzes the potential impact on trade from improvements in hard (physical connectivity via good quality transportation networks) and soft (efficient trade facilitation via an effective border administration and use of ICT) infrastructures. The review highlights enormous differences among the economies involved, as well as the 6 BRI corridors studied – namely, Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar (BCIM), China-Mongolia-Russia (CMR), China-Central Asia-West Asia (CAWA), China-Indochina Peninsula (ICP), China-Pakistan (CP), and the New Eurasian Land Bridge (NELB). 

For the full paper please visit here. 

The ARTNeT Symposium on Preferential trade agreements and inclusive trade brought together experts, researchers, government officials, and private sector representatives from Asia and the Pacific, Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean. Participants of the Symposium shared their views and opinions on various issues embedded in PTAs such as investment provisions, intellectual property rights, and the involvement of the private sector, as well as addressing the fast-emerging area of digital trade and e-commerce. The discussions and opinions will serve to inform priorities of ARTNeT's future work programme, thereby ensuring that the issues found and highlighted over the course of the project continue to be addressed in the future. For programme, presentations, and participants list please visit here.

Furthermore, the Symposium marks the end of substantive work on the Development Account 9th tranche project "Enhancing the Contribution of Preferential Trade Agreements to Inclusive and Equitable Trade", with only evaluation by an contracted independent consultant remaining. In Asia and the Pacific, we have successfully held 5 national training workshops and a regional dialogue, as well as organizing a global meeting and the recently concluded Symposium with our partners in ECA and ECLAC. The project has also generated new knowledge products in the form of handbooks, country studies, regional studies and the newly launched Asia-Pacific Trade Indicators Platform all made freely available here.

The workshop aimed to familiarize participants with state-of-the art structural gravity estimation techniques using STATA. The focus was on calculation of ad valorem equivalents of trade policy measures, with applications to trade facilitation and aid for trade. The workshop, with more than 40 participants from fifteen countries, introduced counterfactual analysis of the welfare effects of trade policy measures based on gravity results, as well as incorporated hands-on sessions giving participants sufficient opportunities to explore existing public databases and tools.

For more information please visit here. 

Recent campaigns have drawn attention to the serious sexual violence issue. ARTNeT Secretariat would like to remind all members and partners that we all have duty and obligation to create an environment to all, where everyone is valued and free from discrimination and harassment of any kind. Let's support colleagues who are harassed and take actions to stop it when we see it!

Devex, a media platform for the global development community, deems to investigate sexual violence in the aid industry - you can understand the issue more and find more information here. 

ASEAN-India Centre (AIC) and our member Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS) are conducting a survey to study the impact of non-tariff measures (NTMs) on trade between ASEAN and India. This survey attempts to assess the level of awareness and perception of NTMs among the stakeholders such as traders, officials, trade/business associations. Fairly detailed questions were opted in order to capture all possible issues related to NTMs in both ASEAN and India.

The questionnaire is online and available here. 

Our partner ITC welcome experts in the areas of fair and ethical trade, sustainability, and public policy to apply to be a member of the Evaluation Committee for the first EU Cities for Fair and Ethical Trade Award! 

For the application details of the call please visit here. 

The Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC) is taking into consideration the possibility to hire talented, motivated and proactive researchers to cover two open positions on data assimilation and ocean modeling. The location is the CMCC – Ocean Modeling and Data Assimilation Division in Bologna, Italy.

For more details of the call please visit here. 

The Internship Program from our partner ADB is a project-oriented learning opportunity for graduate students to gain experience through research assignments based on ADB’s current operational needs. ADB advertises internship assignments twice a year and welcomes motivated, open-minded, and self-directed individuals to apply.

For more information please visit here. 

Aadil Nakhoda, from our member IBA, analyzes the role of the accumulation of long-term secured loans on the participation of firms in exporting activities. Internal sources of finance, such as cash balance and its equivalent as well as operating cash flow, may alleviate concerns on liquidity shocks and finance shorter-term variable costs but long-term secured loans are likely to be required to finance fixed costs related to investments in plant, machinery and other fixed assets that complement exporting activities. Exporting activities may involve hysteresis such that the likelihood of a firm to participate in exporting activities is influenced by the accumulation of long-term secured loans in the period prior to the export transactions. Even though the availability of internal sources of finance and the capital structure of a firm has greater economic significance, we observe that lagged long-term secured loans influences participation in exporting activities. 

For the full article please visit here. 

This book by Sachin Kumar Sharma from our member Centre for WTO Studies, examines the public stockholding policies of selected developing countries from the perspective of WTO rules and assesses whether the provisions of the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) could hamper these countries’ efforts to address the challenges of food security. Further, it highlights the need to amend the provisions of the AoA to make WTO rules just and fair for the millions of people suffering from hunger and malnutrition in developing countries. This book highlights that 12 countries namely China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Kenya, Morocco, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, Zambia and Zimbabwe are facing or will face problems in implementing the food security policies due to the provisions under AoA. These provisions need to be amended for permitting developing countries to address hunger and undernourishment. 

For more information please visit here. 

From 10 to 13 December 2017, the World Trade Organization (WTO) held its 11th Ministerial Conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Our partner CUTS International has produced seven Viewpoint Papers, capturing various issues and interests. They are on: Agriculture, LDC Interests, Blue Economy, TRIPs Issues, E-Commerce, Investment Facilitation and Trade Facilitation in Services. 

IDEAS Center has the pleasure to launch the e-publication of a series of articles and think pieces dedicated to 'The Future of the WTO and the WTO of the Future'. The purpose of this initiative is to make a contribution to LIDCs and LDCs on how to adapt to the post-Nairobi situation and the changing international trade environment. Contributors are experts and specialists from academia, think tanks and private sector from the South and from the North. Those think pieces aim at feeding in the global brainstorming that all WTO members and other stakeholders have been invited to conduct the future of the multilateral trading system.

For the full publication please visit here. 

This book discusses the developments in trade theories, including new-new trade models that account for firm level trade flows, trade growth accounting using inverse gravity models (including distortions in gravity models), the impact of trade liberalization under the aegis of regional and multilateral liberalization efforts of economies using partial and general equilibrium analysis, methodologies of constructing ad valorem equivalents of non-tariff barriers, volatility spillover effects of financial and exchange rate markets. The main purpose of the book is to guide researchers working in the area of international trade, especially focused on empirical analysis of trade policy issues by updating their knowledge on issues related to trade theory, empirical methods, and their applications. 

For more information please visit here. 

Nilanjan Banik, Professor at Bennett University's School of Business, has won the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Information Technology and Quantitative Management (ITQM) with his paper 'Farmer Suicides in India and the Weather God'. The earlier version of the paper was published as ARTNeT working paper No. 161. 

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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.