Hosuk Lee-Makiyama

Who is Hosuk Lee-Makiyama?

Hosuk Lee-Makiyama is a Brussels based economist, trade lawyer and foreign policy commentator. He has written on subjects primarily relating to international trade, digital economy, intellectual property, World Trade Organization and EU-Asia relations, especially with China, Japan and Korea.

Lee-Makiyama has publicly supported EU's attempt to conclude bilateral free trade agreements with large trading blocs, and with economies in Asia . He is also renowned as an authority on electronic commerce, and was the first author to question the legality of internet censorship under WTO rules, and so far the only scholar to have argued the case in a Chinese academic journal. Lee-Makiyama was nominated by the readers of The Guardian as 'one of the 20 most influential people in the open internet's history'.

He has also proposed a new trade agreement, International Digital Economy Agreement, to replace the WTO IT Agreement. Lee-Makiyama was one of the fifty economists and diplomats who signed an open letter to Barack Obama on the Doha Development Agenda on the initiative of Professor Jagdish Bhagwati.

He is currently active as director of the European Centre for International Political Economy. In the past, he also served as a diplomat in the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and represented Sweden and the EU in the WTO, World Intellectual Property Organisation and the executive committee of the UN Economic Commission for Europe.