EU Trade and Investment Policy

The T.M.C. Asser Instituut is a partner organisation in an ongoing research project on Transatlantic Trade and Investment (TTIP), entitled ‘EU Trade and Investment Policy’, an Innovative Training Network, funded by the European Commission within the framework of its Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions.

The EU is currently negotiating a controversial Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreement with the US. TTIP could boost both the EU and US economy and lead to a framework of transatlantic economic cooperation and integration. At the same time, there are growing concerns about the impact of TTIP on law making and democracy, wages and labour rights, and the environment. Apart from economic and political dimensions, TTIP will lead to the evolution of an entirely new field of law, closely related to and developed from EU law and international trade law. The aim of the project is to foster interdisciplinary research into TTIP with a view to understanding and resolving its multiple legal issues.

The project consists of 15 PhD research projects which are supervised by academics of 11 beneficiaries with an interdisciplinary training programme covering the legal, political and economic foundations of TTIP and an interdisciplinary and intersectoral programme of secondments involving 22 partner organisations. The project is coordinated by the University of Birmingham, and runs for the duration of four years, from April 2017 onwards. The project website can be found here.

As a partner organisation in the project, the Asser Institute will host several early stage researchers in 2018 and 2019. In May and June 2018, the first visiting researcher, Cornelia Furculita is hosted at the institute. Cornelia is a PhD candidate at the German University of Administrative Sciences Speyer. Her research project is provisionally entitled ‘The Relationship between State-to-State Dispute Settlement Mechanisms in EU FTAs and WTO’.