USCIB staff made a strong business case for the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) this week at policy conferences in Washington, D.C. and New York. TTIP is a proposed trade agreement between the United States and the European Union, expected to spur economic growth and create jobs on both sides of the Atlantic. The U.S. made promising progress on its trade agenda last week with the introduction in Congress of Trade Promotion Authority, legislation that makes it easier for the U.S. to negotiate and implement trade agreements like TTIP.

In New York on April 23, Norine Kennedy, USCIB’s vice president for strategic international engagement, energy and the environment, gave a presentation at a TTIP stakeholders forum titled “Environment, the UN Post 2015 Development Agenda and SDGs: Synergies for TTIP, Trade and Business.” She noted that the U.S-EU trade agreement plays an integral role in the global economic infrastructure being built in 2015, which will be indispensible to international cooperation on sustainable development and shared prosperity embodied in the United Nations Post 2015 Development Agenda, currently under discussion at the UN this week.

“Successful implementation relies on ambitious and wide mobilization of resources, both financial and technical,” Kennedy said. “A significant share of this mobilization will come from the private sector, and trade and investment are among the main ways that this mobilization will occur.”

She explained that USCIB and its member companies strongly support a successful TTIP conclusion, as that trade agreement will facilitate business’s contributions to sustainable development.

And on April 22, USCIB’s Vice President for Investment and Financial Services Shaun Donnelly spoke at a panel on Transatlantic Energy Issues during a day-long seminar in Washington, D.C. organized by George Mason University and Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. Donnelly talked about the relevance of energy issues in TTIP, noting that energy has not typically been a free-standing chapter or even an area of focus in U.S. or EU trade agreements.

“Negotiators would need to be creative and flexible if they want to use the TTIP to address fundamental energy policy issues,” Donnelly said.

USCIB made the case for TTIP this week as the Senate Finance Committee approved Trade Promotion Authority on April 22.