trade
Looking at the Proposed Free Trade Agreement between India and the European UnionAbout the publication
Since 2007, India and the European Union (EU) have engaged in active negotiations on an ambitious and comprehensive Bilateral Trade and Investment Agreement (BTIA), or a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in generic terms, that includes tariff removal on goods, liberalisation of services, investment, and government procurement among many other issues. The negotiations had seen an impasse since 2013 after the relative reluctance of the newly elected Indian ...
read more "Development Opportunities or Challenges"
read more "Development Opportunities or Challenges"
An assessment of the agreement from an EU perspectiveExecutive Summary
EU-India trade negotiations were relaunched in June 2022. Behind the storytelling of the Commission, Member States and business lobbies lies the reality which can not be hidden for long: the EU-India trade deal is a neoliberal deal, entrenched in the idea that more trade between the two markets will bring significant benefits. Benefits there will be, for Indian and European multinationals but people and the planet will significantly lose from this deal.
Little is known on the ...
read more "EU-India Trade Deal: Business as usual?"
read more "EU-India Trade Deal: Business as usual?"
On 1 January 2021, the world gained another free trade area with the official launch of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), covering 55 member states, i.e. all the African countries except Eritrea. Its establishment has been widely welcomed not only in Africa but also in Europe – and indeed worldwide. It will give the African Union the chance to become a strong, independent player in the world economy – at least that is the optimistic forecast. And it is true that the economic weight of the countries making up the new ...
read more "Why we need to talk about the African free trade area"
read more "Why we need to talk about the African free trade area"
So far, there has not been a lot of discussion on African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) in Europe and Germany. Generally speaking, AfCFTA is welcomed as an African initiative. But there is a lack of discussion as to potential pitfalls of the AfCFTA.
The ultimate aim of the webinar was to get a better understanding on how European policies must be crafted in order to support the realization of increased economic integration and prosperity within Africa. How will AfCFTA reshape economic relations between ...
read more "Webinar on the Political Economy of the African Continental Free Trade Area"
read more "Webinar on the Political Economy of the African Continental Free Trade Area"
Economist and journalist Martin Khor, whose life was cut short by cancer on 1 April 2020, was a standout figure in the struggle for a radical transformation of global economic relations. Born into a middle-class family in Penang (Malaysia), he initially carved out a career in public administration and in academia before taking up his life's mission, the fight for a just new world economic order, as the Research Director of the Consumers' Association of Penang and from 1990 onwards as the Director of the Third World Network (TWN). ...
read more "Martin Khor – a life spent fighting for a just global economy"
read more "Martin Khor – a life spent fighting for a just global economy"
New Rules Proposed under the Guise of “E-Commerce”8 July 2020, Washington, DC ― A new paper new paper written by Deborah James of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and published by Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung examines how “big tech” corporations work to use “trade” rules to rig the rules of the global digital economy to collect more data, exercise more control over people’s lives and over their workers, and amass ever more profit. It looks at what the potential impacts of these rules would ...
read more "New Paper Exposes Big Tech’s Plans for New WTO Rules over Data Access and Control"
read more "New Paper Exposes Big Tech’s Plans for New WTO Rules over Data Access and Control"
A disastrous new constitution for the global economy written by and for Big Tech
The largest corporations in the history of the world – Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft – are seeking to use ‘trade’ rules to rig the rules of the global (digital) economy to enable them to collect more data, exercise more control over our lives and their workers, and amass ever more profit. More than 80 members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) are currently negotiating a new agreement on digital trade based on these proposals. This paper seeks to explain how these...
read more "Digital Trade Rules"
read more "Digital Trade Rules"
Comments on Germany's upcoming EU Council Presidency against the backdrop of the planned EU-MERCOSUR trade agreementRed apricots
In his latest novel, Serotonin, French writer Michel Houellebecq focuses on love and agriculture. The novel's first-person narrator, Florent-Claude Labrouste, leaves his girlfriend, quits his job as an advisor to the French Ministry of Agriculture and embarks on a road trip into his past. His journey leads him to his old college friend Aymeric, the only one in his class who decided to actually become a farmer after studying agricultural ...
read more "Of humans and cattle"
read more "Of humans and cattle"
The coronavirus crisis is demonstrating the failure of existing trade policy. Goods that are in particular demand during the pandemic – such as protective masks, medicines and medical equipment – are being hijacked, immediately after coming off a plane, by cowboys on the wild-west global market or squirrelled away by rogue elements.
This wild-west mentality is particularly evident in the current crisis, but it also forms part of an international commercial framework geared towards free trade, where policy, dressed up in ideological terms, is tailored to ...
read more "The coronavirus free-trade crisis"
read more "The coronavirus free-trade crisis"
Promoting coordinated action by European working-class organisationsThe Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung is an internationally operating non-profit organisation for civic education affiliated with Germany’s Left Party. It is a discussion forum for progressive political alternatives and a centre for critical thinking and research both in Germany and throughout the world. The Brussels Office operates as a think tank reflecting on European and international issues affecting contemporary society.
Objectives
The tender is for a service to...
read more "Call for Tenders: Brochure on International Production Chains"
read more "Call for Tenders: Brochure on International Production Chains"