UK trade policy unit credited with shaping EU approach and informing Korea deal approval

A UK research team that bridges academia and policy was credited with shaping key European Union trade debates and informing the European Parliament’s 2011 approval of the EU–South Korea free trade agreement, the bloc’s most ambitious deal at the time and its first with an Asian country.

The International Trade Policy Unit (ITPU), established in 1999 and led by Dr Stephen Woolcock, produced comparative analyses of EU and US approaches to preferential trade agreements and what it described as the first in-depth study of EU economic diplomacy.

Funded by, among others, the UK Department of Trade and Industry and the European Union, the unit was set up to give lawmakers and businesses objective research on increasingly complex trade and investment arrangements. After the Lisbon Treaty took effect in 2009, expanding the European Parliament’s role in trade and investment, ITPU won a contract to provide expert analysis to the Parliament’s International Trade Committee.

Coordinating a consortium of research institutions across the EU, it delivered 32 research studies and workshops in 14 policy areas between 2010 and 2014, and later secured a further contract to continue similar work up to 2019. Ahead of the Parliament’s 2011 vote on the EU–Korea deal, ITPU produced a 100-page assessment and Woolcock presented its findings at a public hearing in June 2010.

The study concluded the agreement was broadly favourable for the EU and said some organisations had overstated the negative impact of Korean imports.

It was credited with offering a balanced and independent assessment, cited in a written answer from the European Commission to Parliament as part of parliamentary oversight, and described by the EU’s chief negotiator, Ignacio Garcia Bercero, as making a central contribution to the agreement’s approval.

A follow-up study the next year confirmed those initial findings, reporting tangible improvements in EU–Korea trade and investment; Woolcock also delivered a keynote presentation at an EU workshop in October 2012 reviewing the deal’s results. Building on that momentum, the EU pursued trade negotiations with Japan, India, the United States and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

The Lisbon Treaty also extended the EU’s exclusive competence for direct foreign investment, enabling more comprehensive agreements and a stronger investment policy.

ITPU was commissioned to assess the opportunities and challenges of forging a common EU policy on comprehensive investment agreements; its study, The EU Approach to International Investment Policy After The Lisbon Treaty, identified four major issues and, through this work, the unit was able to play a significant role in framing the parameters of the debate on the scope of European investment policy.

With more attention and lobbying focused on Members of the European Parliament after Lisbon, ITPU’s contributions were positioned as providing balanced, expert analysis to support decision-making by MEPs and by businesses navigating overlapping and sometimes conflicting trade commitments.