Capacity building for trade impact assessment: lessons from the development of environmental impact assessment

Abstract

This paper examines difficulties in creating capacity to undertake impact assessments of trade policy and possible approaches to overcoming them, particularly in developing countries. The assessment of trade agreements and related policies can be a highly complex task, involving many different specialist disciplines. Also, many hurdles have to be overcome to integrate an effective impact assessment process into policy- formulation and decision-making mechanisms. Difficulties in some ways similar, in other ways different, have been encountered in developing effective environmental impact assessment (EIA) systems. This paper reviews experience with EIA capacity-building, and considers how the lessons learned might be applied to initiatives to build capacity for the impact assessment of trade policy.