In fact, many of those with economics Ph.D.s elsewhere in the Bank started their careers at the Bank in the Research Group. They moved to other areas of the Bank as their interests evolved and they became less focused on research and more focused on policy development. This movement of economists throughout the organization has helped build a deep reservoir of human capital within the Bank and has fostered close collaboration between Research and other areas of the Bank. Our model with respect to attracting economists into our Research Group is to hire people with strong research skills, with the highest academic credentials and who already have or are likely to develop a policy orientation related to the Bank’s work. We give our economists plenty of time and opportunity to conduct independent research, and expect them to publish their research in the major academic journals and to engage with the economics profession outside the Bank. As they progress in research capability, we require economists to apply the skills and techniques they use in research to policy issues. We expect that, as their academic careers develop, there will be a natural convergence between their research interests and the Bank’s policy agenda. This usually happens as a matter of course because the Bank has a rich agenda of policy issues to work on and the economists at the Bank often have unique access to data and information that would not be available elsewhere.
At the risk of over-simplifying, we could say that we had a system designed to tackle the elimination of tariffs, but not one optimised to address the complex tangle of non-tariff barriers and agricultural and industrial policies that influence trade flows to differing degrees. It is thus necessary to make changes to the multilateral system that prevent trade-distorting practices and, at the same time, to adapt this institution both to the new circumstances and 3  to the new challenges posed by e-commerce and the protection of intellectual property, among others. One of the biggest future challenges, then, for the WTO and, generally, for the system of international institutions is how to change so as to be able to integrate the major global players: one (the United States) is tempted by bilateralism and the other (China) by retaining a model of State capitalism that is hardly compatible in the medium term with an open world subject to multilateral rules. The EU, long-accustomed to preventing the heterogeneity of their economies from hampering the progress brought by economic integration, must take an essential lead on this matter. The WTO’s conflict-resolution system has been pivotal to the sound functioning and predictability of the system. And this is why a solution must be found to the current blocking of appointments to the Appellate Body. Significantly, a system of trade relations based exclusively on bilateral agreements is not the best solution. These usually give rise to a degree of “trade deviation” that detracts overall from the positive effects of “trade creation”.