ECA Staff Training on Trade.

The Trade and Regional Integration Division (TRID) of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) has organized a one-week training course for its staff on economic modeling for trade negotiations. The training began on Monday 19 July, and is being conducted by M. Hedi Bchir, an economist at the Centre d’Etude Prospective et d’Information International’(CEPII). CEPII is an organization based in Paris, France and is attached to French Prime Minster’s Services and the French Planning Agency; with about 30 economists working on international macroeconomics, international trade and trade policy.

During the opening of the training session, the director of TRID, thanked CEPII for agreeing to conduct the training. He described CEPII as an internationally renowned institution with a sound reputation for solid economic modeling. He said the training is just one part of a wider collaborative relationship that ECA will develop with CEPII and other academic and research institutions.

The trainer, Hedi Bchir, is on expert of trade negotiations modeling. During his visit, he is going to make presentations on CEPII's activities, the work of the MIRAGE team (the trade policy and modeling Team in the CEPII) and its recent publications; introduction to the MIRAGE Model, which is a multi-region, multi-sector computable general equilibrium model, devoted to trade policy analysis; The Mirage Model, MAc-Map (Market Access Maps) database, which is a is a bilateral and disaggregated measure of market access which has been constructed to integrate the major instruments of protection (ad valorem and specific duties, prohibitions, tariff quotas, anti-dumping duties, norms) at the most detailed level (tariff lines), as well as all discriminatory regimes; Market Access in non agricultural goods: what is at stake in the Development Round, a study by Hedi Bchir, Lionel Fontagné and Sébastien Jean; and on WTO Market access negotiations in an African perspective.