Åsmund Weltzien
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Åsmund Weltzien is Head of Communications at NUPI. He has a major (hovedfag) in social anthropology from the University of Oslo, and has previously worked as a researcher and research leader in Telenor R&D and as a diplomat and executive officer in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Weltzien works to promote NUPI's research to a wide audience and to the users of our research. He is particularly committed to helping NUPI's researchers create social and scientific impact, to improve our digital communication through development and experimentation, and to build networks of professionals, users and stakeholders where knowledge and insight are shared across institutions and sectors.
In Telenor, Weltzien's own research was focused on the development of new digital technologies and how information and influence spread in social networks. In the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he has worked with various fields such as Norwegian climate policy, security policy, and European policy. From 2011, Weltzien was part of the Foreign Ministry's "Reflex Project", which was to contribute to the development of foreign policy through public debate on central foreign policy issues.
Weltzien has been Head of Communications at NUPI since 2013.
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Clear all filtersGermany in the New Europe. German–Russian Relations in European and Translatlantic Perspective
Whither the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership?
Failures in the World Trade Organisation’s Doha Round have prompted countries to turn to preferential trade agreements. Every country with a stake in world trade is now negotiating bilateral free trade agreements – with occasional infusions of regional attempts to forge greater trade ties by reducing barriers to trade and investments, e.g. the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Some claims Free Trade Agreements to be second-best alternatives to a dysfunctional multilateral system; others see them through the eyes of Jacob Viner and consider them to be termites of the trading system, diverting trade and causing bureaucratic obstacles to trade through Rules of Origin regulations. Yet regardless the side of the argument, the most outstanding feature of many FTAs is that they do not have impressive effects on growth in trade and Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The EU, for instance, considers its FTA with South Korea to be a first-of-a-kind, “deep and comprehensive” bilateral agreement with a medium-sized growth market – and at the time when it was ratified, EU representatives hailed it as an important trade agreement for the European post-crisis recovery. The estimates of the European Commission, however, suggested this FTA to boost GDP in Europe by no more than 0.08 percent.