Prof. Chahir Zaki, member of the EMEA Expert Panel and the EMANES Steering Committee, EMANES Director for Egypt, presented the paper “Does the Depth of Trade Agreements Matter for Trade in Services?”, co-authored with Isabelle Rabaud and Amelie Guillin, at the WTO Public Forum 2023. The paper is based on an EMANES working paper and is forthcoming in the World Economy Journal.It was presented at the session “The role of liberalization of service under the AfCFTA in accelerating green transition in Africa”.
In his intervention Prof Zaki underlined: “To open the services sector in African countries, specific provisions pertaining to services and that are legally enforceable have to be included in the agreement. This will deepen the AfCFTA agreement and guarantee its effective implementation”.
The 2023 Public Forum examined how trade can contribute to a greener and more sustainable future. The Forum also explored how trade can facilitate access to environmental goods, services and technologies, help achieving the Paris Agreement’s Nationally Determined Contributions, and maintain the ambition to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. The Forum had three subthemes: The role of the services sector in sustainable trade, Inclusive policies for the advancement of green trade, and Digitalisation as a tool for the greening of supply chains.
Chahir Zaki is a junior chair professor of economics at the University of Orléans and a research fellow at Laboratoire d’Economie d’Orléans. Chahir is also a research fellow at the Economic Research Forum (Cairo, Egypt) and as a consultant for several international organizations (the World Bank, the International Labor Office and the International Trade Center). He is also the director of Egypt’s pole of the Euro-Mediterranean and African Network for Economic Studies (EMANES) and a member of the experts’ panel of the Euro-Mediterranean Economic Association (EMEA). He has written numerous studies published in refereed journals on international trade, environment, trade policy, trade in services, applied economics, and macroeconomic modeling.
