Hello and welcome everyone to this E-Sype webinar about trade and technology.

My name is Osce Gini. I'm an economist at Eastside and I will be your host today and I'm very pleased to

have Lucian Sarnat as my guest. Lucian is the head of unit for global regulatory

cooperation and international procurement negotiations at DG Trade in the European

Commission and prior to his current post Lucian led DG trade chief economies

unit for over a decade before joining the European, Lucian led DG trade a shift economist unit for over a decade.

Before joining the European Commission, Lucian held several positions at the United Nations,

and he has authored more than 20 publications on trade and competition policy.

Lucian and I will be talking for the next 45 minutes about a paper that Lucian published with us,

titled, We Need to Talk Trade and Technology.

And Trade and Technology will be the topic of our conversation today.

So Lucian, welcome.

Thank you, Oscar. Hello, everyone.

Okay, so let's go straight to the topic.

Let's talk about trade and technology.

First, give us a summary of the paper and tell us why is this important.

Right, well, it's a short paper and I think it started from my acute sense that probably

we are now at an acute critical juncture in trade

policy making with regard to recent important and most likely disruptive technological trends.

If you notice, the paper starts by bringing this interesting feature of new business realities, most likely redefining some critical, very important

industrial sector. So you have, for instance, major software companies or IT or telecom companies

announcing that they will start producing cars. On the other hand, we have major car companies

...