Evan Rogerson is an Adjunct Senior Fellow with the Centre for Multilateralism Studies at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Previously, he held senior positions in the WTO until his retirement in 2017.

Born in New Zealand in 1952, he joined his country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1976 after graduating from Auckland University, working on secondment at the Treasury before postings in Brussels and London. His work in those postings focused on trade policy, particularly New Zealand’s trade and economic relations with the EU.

He joined the GATT Secretariat in 1986, working in the Agriculture Division before going to the Director-General’s Office in 1993, becoming Chief of Staff to Director-General Renato Ruggiero from 1995 to 1999. He subsequently headed the Council and TNC Division, where he was Secretary of the WTO’s top bodies, the Ministerial Conference, the General Council, the Trade Negotiations Committee and the Dispute Settlement Body. In 2012 he came back to the Agriculture and Commodities Division as Director. In this role he headed the Secretariat team for the successful negotiations to abolish agricultural export subsidies in 2015.

Mr Rogerson has written on trade themes in the RSIS Commentary series, in regional media and in other publications. He is a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM) and the Japanese Order of the Rising Sun.

Commentaries

• Failure of WTO Ministerial Highlights Systemic Issues

  06 March, 2024

• New Zealand’s New Government: Soft Power a Casualty of Coalition Politics?

  08 December, 2023

• A New WTO Chief: Director or General?

  05 March, 2021

• Price of Pandemic: Weakened Trade System Exposed

  04 May, 2020

• Looking into the Trade Abyss

  14 October, 2019

• Trade Outlook 2019: Mostly Cloudy

  28 March, 2019

• Trade Threats and Responses

  19 October, 2018

• CO18089 | Seeing Through The Fog of Trade War

  30 May, 2018