TRADE FACILITATION ALONG BELT AND ROAD INITIATIVE - Session I - TRADE FACILITATION
Dr. Abdel Aziz Hamad Aluwaisheg
Dr. Abdel Aziz Hamad Aluwaisheg is the GCC Assistant Secretary General for Political and Negotiation Affairs. In this capacity, he is responsible for coordination of GCC foreign policy towards regional and international issues, as well as managing GCC relations with the rest of the world. He is also responsible for GCC trade negotiations, strategic partnerships and dialogue with other countries and blocs.
Before assuming the post of Assistant Secretary-General in 2011, he served as GCC Director-General for International Economic Relations (2009-2011, and Director of Economic Integration, where he worked for ten years (1999- 2008) overseeing the GCC economic integration process. Between 2002 and 2011, he was also responsible for the establishment of the GCC Common Market, which was launched in December 2007.
Before joining the GCC in 1999, he served as an economist and legal expert at the United Nations in New York. In Saudi Arabia, he worked in a number of government departments. He has also served on several, high-level national commissions for manpower strategies, unemployment, education reform, and strategic cooperation.
Dr. Aluwaisheg studied law at Columbia University in New York, economics at New York University, and political economy at the New University for Social Research, all in New York City. He studied the art of negotiation at the Harvard Negotiation Institute, Harvard Law School, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
He taught at a number of US and GCC universities, most recently at Georgetown University.
He has written extensively on economic, political and legal issues in the GCC, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria and the region at large.
He writes weekly on current economic and international affairs: Every Monday, in English, in Arab News (Saudi Arabia), and every Tuesday in Arabic, at Al-Watan (Saudi Arabia). He also writes a monthly column in the Dubai-based Gulf News.