TAC's economists have been working extensively on international trade and FDI in developing countries during the past ten years. Most of the private sector funded studies are strictly confidential as they are almost always associated with strategic decisions. The largest ones were realized for international banks, with recent assignments on India, South Korea, Turkey, Egypt, and Lebanon.

In parallel, TAC has been significantly involved in research projects and studies funded by multilateral organisations, notably the European Commission (EC) and the United Nation Commission for Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Here below is a short list extracted from TAC’s assignments on international trade and FDI analysis:

• Trade related assistance
  
  Trade related assistance (TRA) is a relatively new area for major aid donors, among which the European Commission. Up to now, there was a clear distinction between development aid, and trade issues, considered mostly from the perspective of international trade negotiations.
  
  In the recent years, the need to better relate the efforts on development to trade policies has emerges more clearly, and was emphasised by the launch of the Doha round of WTO negotiations (the so-called Doha Development Agenda). It has also been put into practice through new types of assistance, linking trade issues to potential economic development, both from individual donors (e.g. European Commission, DFID, ...) and from ‘consortiums’ of donors (e.g. the Integrated Framework programmes led by the World Bank). The EC has decided to set up a specific training course for officials involved in designing such TRA, and Thierry Apoteker is co-leading the pilot sessions of this training.

• EU-India Joint Initiative to Enhance Trade and Investment
  
  From 2001 to-date, TAC has been leading a group of consultants in charge of “feeding” the so-called EU-India Joint Initiative to Enhance Trade and Investment. This initiative was launched at the political summit between the EC and the Indian Government in Lisbon in June 2000 in order to investigate the reasons behind the limited trade flows and FDI between Europe and India.
  
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• Factom: a quantitative instrument to support Vietnam’s accession process to the WTO
  
  When the EC launched a programme designed to support Vietnam’s accession process to the WTO in 2000-01, the Vietnamese authorities expressed their wish to have at their disposal a quantitative instrument that would enable the negotiating team at the WTO table to both benchmark their trade and FDI regimes against those of their “competitors” or neighbours, and test various alternatives in their policies and regulations.
  
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• An FDI benchmarking instrument for UNCTAD
  
  With the increasing competition between developing countries to attract FDI, UNCTAD wanted to provide the various investment promotion agencies in these countries with a full-fledged FDI benchmarking instrument that would allow comparison of regulation, practices, and other factors behind investors’ decisions.
  
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