Richard Newfarmer

One of the unsung virtues of the WTO Chairs Program has been its catalytic role in prompting South-South discussions of trade and cross-country learning.  Two small examples illuminate that point.  The WTO Chair in South Africa, Prof. Wilma Viviers, had created a wonderful tool for helping governments direct their scarce resources promoting export.  The tool, called the Decision Support Model, used detailed WTO product level data configured as a decision tree to identify potential, high value added exports.  While working on Rwanda, I was delighted to enlist the South African team’s support to provide analysis to Rwandan officials, and their 172 page report proved to be of enormous value.  A second example was the request of the Chile WTO Chair, Prof. Dorotea Lopez Giral, to discuss the effects of Covid-19 on African trade to a University of Chile audience.  Connecting up three continents, the Kenyan WTO Chair, Prof. Tabitha Kirti in Nairobi, and I from Washington, conducted a wonderful discussion with a Chilean audience.  These types of connections would simply have not happened had it not been for the WTO Chairs program.