Postigo, Antonio

Antonio Postigo is currently a Senior Fellow at the Barcelona Institute of International Studies (IBEI, Spain). He holds a PhD in International Development Studies from the London School of Economics (LSE, UK), as well as Master’s degrees in Development Management (LSE) and International Affairs (Washington University, USA). He has worked as a Programme Officer at the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN-ESCAP) and has consulted for UN-ESCAP, the World Bank, and several think tanks. He has held visiting positions at the LSE (UK), the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (Singapore), the Institute of Strategic and International Studies (Malaysia), Thammasat University (Thailand), and Kyoto University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies (Japan).

His main research focus is the international political economy of trade and regional integration through Free Trade Agreements (FTAs)—from policymaking processes and FTA design to FTA utilization—the interplay between trade, investment, and FTAs in the context of production networks, and FTAs and digital trade. His regional focus is East and Southeast Asia. His academic work has been published in leading journals in international political economy and international relations (e.g., Review of International Political Economy, International Studies Quarterly, The World Economy, Urban Studies). He has also authored numerous status evaluations and policy outputs on regional integration and cooperation across a wide range of development topics for international organizations (UN-ESCAP, World Bank) and think tanks. In his tenure at UN-ESCAP, he contributed to organizing high-level inter-governmental and government-business conferences.

During his visiting research fellowship at UNU-CRIS, he will work in close collaboration with other researchers in UNU-CRIS’s Economic and Political Interactions Cluster on several projects, including the impacts of FTA design on governments’ policy space and industrial production networks in developing economies; regional integration and automotive industry development in Southeast Asia; and the opportunities and limitations of FTAs as frameworks for the international governance of data flows and artificial intelligence.