LIM, Aik Hoe

Director, Trade and Environment Division, World Trade Organization

As the Director of the Trade and Environment Division at the World Trade Organization, he is in charge of its work on all environment-related matters, as well as on technical regulations and standards. He oversees work of both the Committee on Trade and Environment as well as the Committee on Technical Barriers to Trade. He joined the organization in 1999 and has been a Counsellor to two WTO Director-Generals (2001-2005), Adviser to the Director General’s Consultative Group on “The Future of the WTO”, Secretary to WTO committees, working groups and negotiating bodies in the area of services trade and domestic regulation, as well as focal point for WTO-UN and parliamentary relations. Before joining the WTO, he was a Senior Economic Affairs Officer at the G-15 Summit Level Group and adviser to Personal Representatives of the G-15 Heads of State/Government. He has also served as an urban environment specialist at the International Labour Organization working on ILO’s programme on urban settlement and jobs. He has published widely on services trade, regional trade agreements, domestic regulation and the environment. Some recent work include an edited book on WTO Domestic Regulation and Services Trade: Putting principles into practice (2014); chapters in the Research Handbook on Climate Change and Trade Law (2017); Win-Win: How International Trade Can Help Meet the Sustainable Development Goals (2017); The Trans-Pacific Partnership: A Quest for a Twenty First Century Agreement (2012) and Services liberalization in the new generation of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs): How much further than the GATS? He has a BSc (Hons) Land Management from the University of Reading and a Masters in International Economics (First Prize) from the University of Birmingham, as well as Post-Graduate Diplomas in Financial Economics and Research Methodology. He was a recipient of the Gilbert Murray Trust (Oxford) International Relations Award (1995). He has been a Visiting WTO Fellow to the Institute for International Trade at the University of Adelaide (2007) and Adjunct Fellow of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (2006-2016).