Dr. Zdenek Drabek has acted as an independent consultant and, previously, as a staff member of the WTO and the World Bank around the world. His involvement has been primarily in three areas – assistance to countries in their bids to accede to the WTO, in their design of trade policies (trade and investment regulations, formation of regional economic groupings), and in the integration of trade policies into their strategies towards domestic macroeconomic stability and prudent debt management. All of these assignments typically included discussions with government representatives, central banks, industrial associations, representatives of civil society as well as universities and research institutes;
- WTO Accession. While negotiating strategies in the process of accession into the WTO are designed and carried out by national governments, external assistance is often sought to introduce them and clarify WTO rules and disciplines and obtain expert assessments of costs and benefits of WTO membership. This kind of advice was provided in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Russia, Serbia, Montenegro, Vietnam, Laos and Vanuatu;
- Regional Trade and Investment Agreements. Parallel to countries’ membership in the multilateral WTO, many countries have been forming regional blocks. Dr. Drabek has provided advice on ensuring that these regional initiatives are both economically sound and consistent with countries multilateral obligations. Such advise has been provided to ECOWAS, EAC, SADC, SACU, EPA, African Free Trade Area, Eurasia Economic Union, Association of Central Banks of South East Asia.
- International regulation of trade and investment. Dr. Drabek held a key responsibility for the introduction of market – based policy to regulate inward and outward foreign investment in Czechoslovakia. He founded and managed the first investment promotion agency in Czechoslovakia in its transition to market economy, and was a co-founder of the US Enterprise Fund Czechoslovakia. Elsewhere, he helped to negotiate international treaty on trade and investment with the US and the EU by East African Community, Southern African Development and Cooperation (SADC), The African Union, ECOWAS, ASEAN.
- Trade Policy. As a lead World Bank economist Dr. Drabek designed and negotiated with governments’ trade policy reforms in Morocco, Algeria, the Philippines, Romania and Zimbabwe. Following successful negotiations, he typically followed up by helping the government execute the agreements;