Culture is a powerful factor in shaping how people think, communicate and behave. It therefore affects how they negotiate. Taking participants from the simple to the complex, this compact and practical course will look at the cultural dimension of negotiation.

Writing reports and other kinds of documents is one of the immediate follow-up tasks of participation in intergovernmental conferences, meetings and negotiations. This task is extremely time-consuming even more so for the conference delegate who does not possess appropriate tools or does not apply a comprehensive methodology.

Throughout history, the speech has been one of the most powerful forms of communication. Technological, social and economic changes have enhanced that power. As digital communication has increased, speeches have had to become more authentic and honest. 

The global financial crises has brought to the fore the pertinence of corporate governance issues across industrialized, emerging and developing economies alike. Corporations play a valuable role in our communities and in nations around the world. Good Corporate Governance is a union between the financial and personal success of a corporation.

Prior to the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations, which were concluded in December 1993, multilateral trade negotiations were seen as a preserve of the developed countries and the developing countries have only a marginal role to play in the negotiation process; they were primarily the recipients of preferential market access and other special differential treatment.

This course serves as an introduction to money creation. One of the great mysteries and elegant features of the financial system in general, and of the banking sector in particular, is the creation of new money. The largest component of the money stock, bank deposits, is literally created by accounting entries.

The economies of different countries are organised in different combinations of what economic literature classifies as traditional economic systems, command systems and free market systems.

Public diplomacy, and its sister concept, soft power, dominate much of the current academic debate about 21st century diplomacy. A major challenge for governments is how to develop effective public diplomacy, and optimize the use of their soft power, in a rapidly changing global environment.

Nowadays, as a result of the globalisation process, individuals and organizations constantly need to be engaged in developing their cross-cultural competences in order to operate effectively in a multilateral setting and avoid barriers, misunderstandings and prejudices in negotiation and mediation processes.

Currently, Sustainable Development emerges as a new kind of knowledge for better understanding of the social, natural and economic processes which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations in meeting their own needs. This concept has gained a great importance as a scientific vision in the last two decades.