Hosuk Lee-Makiyama is a

Brussels Brussels (french: Bruxelles or ; nl, Brussel ), officially the Brussels-Capital Region (All text and all but one graphic show the English name as Brussels-Capital Region.) (french: link=no, Région de Bruxelles-Capitale; nl, link=no, Bruss ...

-based economist, trade lawyer and foreign policy commentator. He has written on subjects primarily relating to international trade, digital economy,

intellectual property Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, cop ...

World Trade Organization The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an intergovernmental organization that regulates and facilitates international trade. With effective cooperation in the United Nations System, governments use the organization to establish, revise, and ...

(WTO) and

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been de ...

-Asia relations, especially with China, Japan and Korea. Lee-Makiyama has publicly supported the EU's attempt to conclude bilateral

free trade agreements A free-trade agreement (FTA) or treaty is an agreement according to international law to form a free-trade area between the cooperating states. There are two types of trade agreements: bilateral and multilateral. Bilateral trade agreements occur ...

with large

trading bloc A trade bloc is a type of intergovernmental agreement, often part of a regional intergovernmental organization, where barriers to trade (tariffs and others) are reduced or eliminated among the participating states. Trade blocs can be stand-alon ...

s, and with economies in Asia . He is also renowned as an authority on electronic commerce, and was the first author to question the legality of

internet censorship Internet censorship is the legal control or suppression of what can be accessed, published, or viewed on the Internet. Censorship is most often applied to specific internet domains (such as Wikipedia.org) but exceptionally may extend to all Int ...

under WTO rules, and so far the only scholar to have argued the case in a Chinese academic journal. Lee-Makiyama was nominated by the readers of ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'' newspaper as 'one of the 20 most influential people in the open internet's history'. He has also proposed a new trade agreement, International Digital Economy Agreement (IDEA), to replace the WTO's

Information Technology Agreement The Information Technology Agreement (ITA) is a plurilateral agreement enforced by the World Trade Organization (WTO) and concluded in the ''Ministerial Declaration on Trade in Information Technology Products'' in 1996, and entered into force ...

(proposed by the

European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body ...

to the WTO members in 2012). He is currently active as director of the European Centre for International Political Economy (

ECIPE The European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE) is an independent and non-profit policy research think tank dedicated to trade policy and other international economic policy issues of importance to Europe. It is based in Brussels ...

). In the past, he also served as a diplomat in the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and represented the EU in the WTO and the United Nations. He regularly comments in European, US and Chinese media.

References

External links

Profile: Hosuk Lee-Makiyama

ECIPE website

Interview and profile in Nikkei print issue 2010-12-21
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lee-Makiyama, Hosuk Living people Swedish diplomats International trade law International economists Year of birth missing (living people)