Technical Assistance to support Pacific ACP States to prepare their trade in goods market access offers for the purpose of EPA negotiations

Name of Client: TradeCom 

Detailed description of project:

The overall objective of this project was to assist the 7 countries of the Pacific Island Forum in preparing their EPA trade in goods offers. For this project, ECOPA developed an EPA Data Tool (based on a partial equilibrium model) to analyze and formulate EPA offers.

The Data Tool was built upon trade flows and tariffs data coming from three different databases:

• National data provided by Customs Authorities;
• Mirror data provided by the EU, extracted from the Comext2 database;
• Mirror data for other major partners (Australia, New Zealand, USA), extracted from the WITS/COMTRADE database.

The ECOPA’s consultants provided extensive training to senior staff in the 7 PACPS on how to use and update the Data Tool.

Type of services provided:

For this assignment, ECOPA provided the Team leader as well as three senior trade economists, the methodology, the modelling, the overall co-ordination, the training and was responsible for reporting to the client.