WITA Webinar Featuring:
Jake Colvin, Executive Director, Global Innovation Forum and Vice President, National Foreign Trade Council.
Javier Lopez Gonzalez, Senior Trade Policy Analyst, the (OECD) Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Ambassador Frances Lisson, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Australia to the World Trade Organization.
Moderator: Wendy Cutler, Vice President, and Managing Director, Washington D.C. office of the Asia Society Policy Institute
Jake Colvin serves as Vice President for Global Trade Issues at the National Foreign Trade Council and Executive Director of NFTC’s Global Innovation Forum.
Through the Global Innovation Forum, he connects a global network of startup, business, education and nonprofit leaders to elevate the opportunities that exist to be global from Day One and explore the role of government policies and programs in creating a vibrant and inclusive international marketplace.
At the National Foreign Trade Council, he leads efforts to make America more successful in the global economy by shaping global digital trade rules and engagement with multilateral institutions including the World Trade Organization and Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum (APEC). He also guides the Council’s Cuba strategy and has led several business delegations to Havana.
Jake is a cleared advisor to the U.S. Government as a member of the Trade and Environment Policy Advisory Committee and has testified before Congress. He has written about trade and foreign policy for media including Business Week, Forbes, Inc. and Politico and has provided analysis for outlets including CNBC, CNN, NBC News, NPR and Time Magazine.
Originally from Long Island, New York, he is a graduate of the University of Richmond and the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies. He lives in Washington with his wife and two daughters.
Javier Lopez Gonzalez is a senior trade economist at the Trade and Agriculture Directorate of the OECD. His recent work is focused on digital trade, including: developing frameworks for the measurement and analysis of digital trade; creating a typologies of approaches to cross border data regulation; and exploring the impacts of digitalisation on trade and what market openness means in the 21st century. He has previously worked on the drivers and implications of participation in global value chains, co-authoring papers on global patterns of supply chain trade; the implications of GVC participation for developing countries; the links between GVC participation and wage inequality; and how SMEs can make the most out of GVC participation. Javier holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Sussex.
Ambassador Frances Lisson has been Australia’s Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the WTO in Geneva since January 2017 and has chaired the WTO Joint Statement Initiative on Electronic Commerce since 2018.
She has a longstanding career in the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade specialising in trade policy and international relations. She previously led Australia’s bilateral FTA negotiations with Japan; was a lead negotiator in FTAs with China, the Republic of Korea and Indonesia; and a member of Australia’s negotiating team during the Doha and Uruguay Rounds.
Frances has had former diplomatic postings to the United Nations in New York, Ottawa, Tokyo and Suva.
Wendy Cutler joined the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI) as vice president in November 2015. She also serves as the managing director of the Washington D.C. Office. In these roles, she focuses on building ASPI’s presence in Washington — strengthening its outreach as a think/do tank — and on leading initiatives that address challenges related to trade and investment, as well as women’s empowerment in Asia. She joined ASPI following an illustrious career of nearly three decades as a diplomat and negotiator in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR).
Most recently she served as Acting Deputy U.S. Trade Representative, working on a range of U.S. trade negotiations and initiatives in the Asia-Pacific region. In that capacity, she was responsible for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, including the bilateral negotiations with Japan. She also was the chief negotiator to the U.S.-Korea (Korus) Free Trade Agreement.
Cutler received her master’s degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and her bachelor’s degree from the George Washington University.