May 3, 2004

Speaker Biographies

Carol Balassa is the director for services, trade negotiations, media, communications, and energy services in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. She has led U.S. audiovisual delegations to Europe and Canada, meeting with a cross-section of government officials and industry representatives to discuss the implications of applying trade disciplines to the audiovisual sector. Ms. Balassa's newest area of responsibility is energy services. In that capacity, she chairs the U.S. interagency working group on energy services and leads the U.S. delegation on energy services to the World Trade Organization. Ms. Balassa is the author of several works relating to trade, including Trade Issues in the Motion Picture Industry.

Claude E. Barfield is a resident scholar and the director of trade, science, and technology policy studies at AEI. He is the author or editor of a number of books on trade and science policy, including Free Trade, Sovereignty, Democracy: The Future of the World Trade Organization (2001). In 1999, he coauthored Tiger by the Tail: China and the World Trade Organization with Mark Groombridge. Before coming to AEI, he served in the Ford administration, on the staff of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, and as a costaff director of the President' s Commission for a National Agenda for the Eighties.

Julia Christine Bliss is the deputy assistant U.S. trade representative for services. Previously she worked at the USTR's Office of the General Counsel, where she was responsible for providing legal advice and analysis for all bilateral, regional, and multilateral trade in services issues. Ms. Bliss acted as lawyer for services, financial services, and entry chapters in Singapore and for the Chile FTAs and WTO services negotiations. She has also worked as acting assistant U.S. trade representative in the monitoring and enforcement division.

William Crosbie is the minister-counselor for economic and trade policy at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C. He has worked with the federal government since 1986, as a ministerial adviser (in the portfolios of Transport, International Trade, and Fisheries and Oceans) and as a trade negotiator. His experience in trade negotiations began with the Canada-U.S. FTA in 1988 and continued with NAFTA, the Uruguay Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations, and the creation of the World Trade Organization. During the period 1997-2000, he held several positions within the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, focusing on trade policy issues and negotiations related to services, investment, competition policy, intellectual property, cultural industries, telecommunications, and electronic commerce.

Patrick A. Messerlin is a professor of economics at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, known as Sciences Po, and is director of the Groupe d'Economie Mondiale de Sciences Po, an independent research unit seeking to improve the performance of French and European public policies in a global world. Since July 2002, he has served as cochairman with Ernesto Zedillo, director of the Yale Center for the Study on Globalization (Task Force on Trade and Finance in the UN Millenium Development Goals Project). From 2001 to 2002, he was special adviser to Mike Moore, WTO director-general. He also serves as a member of the Preparatory Conference to the G7-G8 Summits (a group of independent persons gathered by the Institute for International Economics). He has published a dozen of books and hundreds of papers on trade theory and policy. His most recent book is Measuring the Costs of Protection in Europe: European Commercial Policy in the 2000s (Institute for International Economics, Washington, 2001).

Bonnie Richardson is vice president for trade and federal affairs with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Since joining MPAA in 1993, she has worked with federal government agencies and with Congress to reduce foreign trade barriers and improve protection of intellectual property for the U.S. motion picture, television programming, and home video industries. Ms. Richardson also covers domestic regulatory issues of interest to the film and entertainment industries. From 1989 to1993, she worked at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. Ms. Richardson was chief U.S. negotiator for the services market access negotiations during the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations. She also served for twelve years as a Foreign Service officer, including postings at the U.S. embassies in Nigeria and El Salvador and several assignments in the Trade Office at the State Department.

Stephen E. Siwek is a principal with Economists Incorporated, an economic research and consulting firm in Washington, D.C. Previously, he was a senior consultant at Snavely, King & Associates. He writes and consults on international trade issues in motion pictures, television programs, and computer software.

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