It Is My Pleasure to Accept the Kind Invitation of the Secretary-General of UNCTAD, Ambassador

Preparatory Committee for UNCTAD XI 16 January 2004 HEARING WITH CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE PRIVATE SECTOR Statement by Professor Mario Ferreira Presser, Coordinator, Economic Diplomacy Course, Institute of Economics Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Sao Paulo, Brazil)

It is my pleasure to accept the kind invitation of the Secretary-General of UNCTAD, Ambassador Rubens Ricupero, to participate in the first Hearings with the Civil Society and the Private Sector, organized as part of UNCTAD's preparations for UNCTAD XI in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The purpose of my short intervention is to inform you of a joint partnership between UNCTAD and my university, UNICAMP, to offer an Economic Diplomacy Course at the postgraduate level. The Economic Diplomacy Course is being offered since October in Sao Paulo. It includes 30 participants, mainly executives and consultants of private firms. It lasts one academic year. It has 12 modules of 30 hours and a simulation module of 12 hours. More information about the curriculum will be shortly available in the pilot version of UNCTAD's Training Resources Platform. The main objective of this course is to qualify working executives of the private sector and officers of the public sector to understand the content and to play an active role in the shaping of bilateral, regional and multilateral negotiations that Brazil is currently engaged. Likewise, the course looks at the overall issue of linking trade and development. The structure of the course is mainly based on UNCTAD's para. 166 course on key issues of the International Economic Agenda. The course focuses on the links between trade, finance, foreign direct investment and sustainable development in the context of the current international trade negotiations, in order to: - Enhance the capacity of the participants to identify issues and the approaches adopted in their treatment, in the current trade negotiations and their implications on national development strategies; - Emphasize the need to have an integrated approach linking trade, finance, investment, transfer of technology and the national strategy of sustainable development even for business advocacy purposes; - Increase awareness in the civil society that globalization implies the continuous evolving of the rules of the world trading system and the civil society is increasingly experiencing the impact of this process. For a better participation in the world trading system, it is thus necessary to understand clearly the wide implications of these rules; - Increase awareness of the diverse policy and other conditions – for example, in the specific case of Brazil, a major effort to eliminate poverty and to attain greater equity is an overwhelming condition – necessary for attaining competitiveness, reducing the external vulnerability and participating effectively in the current global economic environment; - Use multidisciplinary approaches in tackling the various aspects of trade and sustainable development issues; - Show best practices in designing and implementing successful national policies on trade and sustainable development in the developing countries. Let me say a few words about my University. The State University at Campinas (State of Sao Paulo, Brazil) is a leading Brazilian Research University founded in 1966. It has currently a budget of around 300 million US Dollars, a university staff of around 1.800 positions distributed in 20 units (faculties and institutes). 95% of the faculty staff has at least a PhD. According to the Institute of Scientific Information (USA), the university staff published around 1.700 indexed articles in 2002. The Institute of Economics of UNICAMP is the leading UNCTAD's partner at UNICAMP. It has a faculty staff around 80 and at least 19 participate effectively in the economic diplomacy course. The Institute of Economics asked for the collaboration of our colleagues from the other faculties who have a strong interest on the issues being negotiated at the multilateral level and we do have the active collaboration of few members of the two others states universities in Sao Paulo. Of course, the Economic Diplomacy Course would not have been launched in last October without the partnership with UNCTAD. UNCTAD has offered internships and training on trade and other key international issues for a few faculty members in 2002-03 and developed in the last years analytical inputs and training materials which allow a research university with a consolidated team of professors and researchers adapt them to local needs identifying national and regional development implications of a given issue being negotiated. UNICAMP intends to customise UNCTAD's training materials, adding to them the results of its past research and developing new research according the needs. The Institute of Economics has a long tradition of producing detailed competitiveness studies of the Brazilian economy and has a considerable amount of research on topics such a finance, agriculture, foreign direct investment, industry, intellectual property, labour markets and social policies. Therefore, by injecting national inputs into UNCTAD's analytical work, UNICAMP aims at achieving the idea of "capacity development" rather than a simple "capacity building". We have already promoted a joint symposium with UNCTAD on the state of the WTO negotiations in last August in Campinas, with the participation of more than 45 speakers from the Brazilian universities, Brazilian officials, UNCTAD and ECLAC staff. The Symposium was opened by UNCTAD's Secretary-General and the Minister of Agriculture. I would like to acknowledge here the support which has been given to the course from our Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We intend to enhance the partnership with UNCTAD in the next years to achieve the link between theory and practice that should be pursued in the training and research activities of an academic institution which intends to pursue excellence in the field of economic diplomacy.