Jean Heilman Grier is the Trade Principal at Djaghe LLC. She has over 35 years of experience in international procurement and trade as a negotiator, lawyer, adviser, and consultant.
At Djaghe LLC, she advises businesses, organizations, and governments on a wide variety of international procurement and trade issues. Her expertise includes global procurement, trade policy, U.S. trade laws, international trade agreements, and trade negotiations. She is the author of The International Procurement System: Liberalization & Protectionism (Dalston Press, 2022) and numerous other publications on international procurement and other trade topics. Since 2013, she has written the blog, Perspectives on Trade.
At the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, she served as Senior Procurement Negotiator. In that role, she led the development of trade policy related to public procurement and negotiations for the United States on the World Trade Organization’s Government Procurement Agreement and procurement chapters in numerous free trade agreements across the globe, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
At the U.S. Department of Commerce, she served as Senior Counsel for Trade Agreements. In that position, she engaged in a broad range of international trade issues, including the negotiations of the North American Free Trade Agreement and numerous bilateral agreements with Japan. She also participated in anti-dumping and countervailing duty investigations, as well as investigations conducted under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962.
Prior to entering the U.S. government, she was an Assistant Attorney General with the State of Minnesota. In that Office, she served as Chief of the Public Utilities Division, representing the State in electric, gas, and telecommunications rate cases, Chief of the Consumer Protection Division, litigating consumer fraud cases, and as the first attorney for the Minnesota Environmental Quality Board.
She received law degrees from the University of Minnesota (J.D.) and the University of Washington (LL.M in Asian Law) and an undergraduate degree in Political Science from South Dakota State University. As a Fulbright Scholar at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, she conducted research in Japanese administrative law. She is a member of the District of Columbia Bar.
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The International Procurement System: Liberalization & Protectionism
Jean Heilman Grier
Government procurement is both a highly important and a highly problematic component of the international trading system. It is important because governments purchase enormous amounts of goods and services and problematic because it is especially sensitive to the twin forces of liberalization and protectionism. Governments face strong pressures to buy domestic products and at the same time open foreign procurement markets for their suppliers. The international procurement system has developed a sophisticated set of agreements that open foreign procurement markets while allowing countries to balance liberalization and protectionism.
This book strips away the complexity of the international procurement system and explains its building blocks – its foundational agreements, key players, challenges, and prospects for continued expansion.