Vangelis (Evangelos) Vitalis is a New Zealand diplomat and trade negotiator currently working as the Deputy Secretary for the country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Prior to taking up his role in Wellington in 2017, Vangelis was New Zealand's Permanent Representative to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Geneva where he chaired the agriculture negotiations in a personal capacity. In this role he helped draft the text of the historic Nairobi WTO Ministerial Decision to eliminate agricultural export subsidies. Vangelis has also been the Ambassador to the European Union and NATO in Brussels and has had postings to Canberra and Moscow. Text was copied from this source, which is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Vitalis is the first Greek-New Zealander to be appointed ambassador.
Career
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Wellington, New Zealand
Vitalis is believed to have joined the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade in late 1993, during which time he worked on the Africa Desk and subsequently worked for three months in New York as a junior New Zealand Foreign Ministry delegate to the United Nations General Assembly – this was also during the time that New Zealand was a member of the UN Security Council. On his return to New Zealand, Vitalis worked in the Ministry's Economic Division until he was posted to the New Zealand Embassy in Moscow as Second and then First Secretary followed (1997–1999), including a year's language training at the Moscow State Linguistic University (1996).
Russian Ministry of Agriculture, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan
Vitalis then worked for a time at the Russian Ministry of Agriculture as part of a team developing a partial equilibrium model to assess the potential impact of Russia's accession to the World Trade Organization on its agricultural sector (1999–2000). Vitalis was an early advocate of the need to analyse Russia's agricultural policies at the federal and sub-federal level. He suggested that this was the only way to establish the full picture of Russian agricultural subsidisation a point reinforced in a paper he published on the subject. He also worked briefly during this period in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan as an adviser on a range of diverse issues including currency reform and WTO accession.
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Paris, France
From 2001 to 2011, Vitalis worked in various roles at the OECD. Between 2001 and 2004 he worked in Paris for the OECD Secretariat as a Chief Adviser. In particular, he headed a unit charged with providing the analytical papers to support the Ministerial-level OECD Round Table on Sustainable Development. This influential body was chaired by the former New Zealand Minister for Environment and Associate Minister of Finance, Rt Hon Simon Upton. Ministers from a range of countries participated in Round Table meetings, including from France, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Sweden, Canada, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Brazil and South Africa among others. The unique format of the Round Table also included leading NGOs, such as Greenpeace and WWF, alongside business organisations such as the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, Shell, BP and so on. The unit (which fluctuated in size from up to eight analysts) led by Vitalis and reporting to the Rt Hon Upton prepared a number of ground-breaking economic papers on a range of sustainability-related issues, including how to measure sustainable development,Sustainable Development OECD a set of measurements for a range of sustainable development-related issues,Preparing for the World Summit: Some Information about Sustainable Development OECD measuring embedded carbon flows (i.e. a consumption flow model);Sustaining Whose Development? Analysing the International Effect of National Policies OECD the potential synergies between investment flows and ODA,Sustainable Development OECD subsequently included as a chapter in a book published by the OECD and a controversial paper on the rise of eco-labels and their trade and environment-related effects.Private Voluntary Eco-labels: Trade Distorting, Discriminatory and Environmentally Disappointing OECD Together with Rt Hon Upton, Vitalis produced an economic analysis and a set of policy recommendations to address illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing on the high seas (IUU).Stopping the High Seas Robbers: Coming to Grips with Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fisheries on the High Seas OECD This analysis ensured that Vitalis was included as an Economic Expert Adviser to the prestigious and high-level OECD IUU Ministerial Task Force (2004–05)Closing the Net OECD and subsequently chaired the OECD Trade and Environment Committee (2008–to the present), including the OECD Global Forum on Trade and Climate Change (2009).
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Wellington, New Zealand
Vitalis rejoined the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade in 2004 and worked in the Economics Division of the Ministry as the Head of the Trade and Economic Analysis Unit. He initially worked on a set of papers on international economic issues relevant to New Zealand as a way of informing the development of the Government's Growth and Innovation Framework. It is during this time that Vitalis is believed to have first advocated the development of a customs union between Australia and New Zealand – he is known to have opposed a currency union. He also proposed the establishment of a "Minister for Australia" to take this idea forward as a way to 'refresh' the Closer Economic Relationship between Australia and New Zealand in time for the twenty-fifth anniversary (in 2008) of the launch of that agreement.
Vitalis also managed the (general equilibrium) modelling work for the Joint Study assessing the potential benefits of the China-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement (FTA). He then transferred to the Trade Negotiations Division and became the investment chapter lead negotiator in the China-New Zealand FTA and the lead New Zealand negotiator for the treaty-status trade & labour, and trade & environment agreements between China and New Zealand, which were negotiated alongside the China-New Zealand FTA (2004–08). New Zealand was the first OECD country to conclude an FTA with China.
It was during this period that Vitalis contributed a chapter on the impact of OECD countries' trade policies on developing countries for a book edited by Robert Picciotto (former Director-General (Operations Evaluation) of the World Bank. He also published articles in The Journal of Integrative Environmental Sciences, including on the linkage between economics, science and sustainability and an assessment of the sustainable development effects of New Zealand's ground breaking agriculture reforms. In 2005, Vitalis contributed a chapter on the intersection between agricultural, trade and environmental policies to a book edited by Thomas Lines of the International Institute for Sustainable Development. The following year, Vitalis' work on agricultural reform and the impact of subsidies on both the economy and the environment formed the basis of a chapter in a book published by the OECD as part of its series on subsidy reform and sustainability.
Vitalis has been a senior New Zealand negotiator at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) including on trade and environment-related issues (2004–08). In particular, he is believed to have played an influential role in the WTO negotiations on environmental goods, including by chairing the 'Friends of Environmental Goods' process which collectively identified and tabled at the WTO more than 150 specific products as environmental goods (2004–07). The 'Friends' grouping included primarily OECD countries. Vitalis is also believed to have first proposed the innovative 'living list' concept also formally tabled at the WTO by New Zealand. Such a 'living' process would enable the regular updating of any list of products agreed at the WTO to ensure that the list keeps pace with the rapid evolution of environmental technologies. At the same time, a series of papers tabled by New Zealand at the WTO and also believed to have been written by Vitalis proposed the establishment of a Voluntary Consultative Mechanism (later, a Voluntary Consultative Process) as a Pareto optimal way to address the apparent intersection between trade measures contained in Multilateral Environmental Agreements and the WTO Agreements.http://www.panda.org/downloads/policy/measwto.pdf It was during this time that Vitalis also produced his analysis of the relationship between trade, innovation and competition in the New Zealand context – a paper subsequently published by the OECD.
Vitalis was appointed New Zealand's Chief Negotiator for the ASEAN-Australia-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement (FTA) (AANZFTA; 2008–10). He was also appointed simultaneously to lead the Malaysia-New Zealand FTA (MNZFTA; 2009–10) negotiations which at that time had been stalled for over eighteen months. Vitalis successfully led the New Zealand teams which concluded both the AANZFTA and revived the moribund MNZFTA process such that less than six months later the MNZFTA was also concluded and came into force on 1 August 2009. The signing of the agreement with Malaysia took place in Kuala Lumpur and was overseen by the Malaysian and New Zealand Prime Ministers and a sixty-member New Zealand business delegation.
At the time of the conclusion of the AANZFTA and MNZFTA, ASEAN was New Zealand's third most important trading partner after Australia and China and Malaysia was New Zealand's eighth most important trading partner. The ground-breaking AANZFTA was the first agreement negotiated jointly by Australia and New Zealand. It is characterised by a range of WTO-plus commitments made by ASEAN in areas as diverse as goods, services and intellectual property rights. The agreement is also characterised by the innovative use of an 'economic cooperation' chapter explicitly designed to help ASEAN members effectively implement the agreement. In particular, with its 'built-in' agenda, the AANZFTA is a 'living agreement'.The benefits for investment OECD The deadline for the elimination of tariffs in the AANZFTA mirrors that of the China-New Zealand FTA, i.e. twelve years and is a significant improvement on the existing Thailand-New Zealand Closer Economic Partnership which eliminated tariffs on New Zealand products within twenty years. The Malaysia-New Zealand FTA contains a number of significantly AANZFTA-Plus provisions, not least the elimination of a 15% tariff on kiwifruit and a range of new services commitments ensuring that New Zealand education, engineering and environmental service providers have a 'first mover' advantage over their competitors ( and). Vitalis' leadership in successfully concluding the AANZFTA was specifically acknowledged by the then New Zealand Minister of Trade, Hon Tim Groser and during the New Zealand parliamentary debate on the ratification of the agreement itself. Vitalis also led the New Zealand AANZFTA 'roadshow' which promoted the opportunities presented by this plurilateral agreement to New Zealand stakeholders in all of the main centres of New Zealand.
New Zealand High Commission, Canberra, Australia (2009-2011)