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The alcohol import monopoly is exercised by Alcosuisse (a profit centre of the Swiss Alcohol Board) and applied to ethanol containing at least 80% alcohol by volume. (...) The Confederation's import monopoly on ethanol used as bio-fuel was terminated on 1 October 2010. Total imports of ethanol into Switzerland in 2015 amounted to 62 million litres, of which 34 million litres were imported by Alcosuisse and 28 million litres were predominantly for use as bio-fuel.

EU countries were required to transpose three directives into national law by 18 April 2016: Directive 2014/24/EU on Public Procurement, Directive 2014/25/EU on Procurement by Entities Operating in the Water, Energy, Transport and Postal Services Sectors, and Directive 2014/23/EU on the Award of Concession Contracts. Consequently, Liechtenstein is in the process of updating is national legislation, and the government has published a report with deadlines for comments of 9 September 2016 for the Draft Government Bill Concerning the Amendment of the Act on Public Procurement and of 7 October 2016 for the Draft Government Bill Concerning the Amendment of the Act on Public Procurement of the Utilities for Public Works Contracts, and Supply and Services Contracts in Water, Energy, Transport, and Postal Services. According to the authorities, (...) New selection criteria may include the organization, qualifications and experience of staff entrusted with the implementation of the contract, and environmental criteria as well as life-cycle costing can be applied. (...)

Under the 1998 Public Procurement Act, fully open or restricted tendering can be used to assign contracts. Procedures can be carried out using methods such as framework agreements, dynamic purchasing systems, and competitive dialogue. These methods have not yet been used in practice. Contracts above the EEA thresholds are awarded according to international rules (i.e. EEA, GPA and FTA rules); they are announced in the EU electronic government procurement system (Table 3.18). For contracts below the EEA thresholds, public utilities usually use open or negotiated procedures; otherwise, relevant international rules apply. Under the two laws mentioned above (Act on the Procurement of Utilities for Public Works Contracts, and Supply and Services Contracts in Water, Energy, Transport, and Postal Services; Act on Public Procurement for all other Public Purchases), contracts are awarded according to the most economically advantageous tender or to the tender with the lowest price. Additional criteria, such as quality, environmental characteristics, and cost-effectiveness, may also be taken into account. (...)

(...) Switzerland signed WIPO's Marrakesh VIP Treaty on 28 June 2013, and ratified the Nagoya Protocol to the Convention on Biological Diversity on 11 June 2014. [167] (...)

[167] Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization to the Convention on Biological Diversity adopted on 29 October 2009. The treaty entered into force for Switzerland on 12 October 2014.

Bilaterally, Switzerland has concluded a Free Trade Agreement with China that entered into force on 1 July 2014. The Agreement contains an elaborate chapter on intellectual property protection, which builds on the Swiss-Chinese bilateral dialogue on intellectual property since 2007 and provides for "more precisely [specified] or enhanced IP projection" than the TRIPS Agreement. The IP provisions provide for, inter alia, protection for acoustic trademarks , patentability of inventions in the area of biotechnology and herbal medicines , disclosure of traditional knowledge and genetic resources in patent applications, pharmaceutical test data exclusivity for 6 years , plant variety protection, and protection against misleading use of country names. Under the Agreement, border measures must be available also in respect of patent and design violations both on import and export. Bilateral Swiss memoranda on dialogues on intellectual property exist also with Singapore and India.

Swiss agricultural policy pursues diverse objectives, namely sustainable and market-oriented agricultural production that contributes to food security, protection of natural resources, landscape stewardship, decentralized settlement, and animal welfare. The Federal Government is directed by the Swiss Constitution to support agriculture's multi-functionality and delivery of public goods, inter alia, with direct payments linked to environmental cross-compliance.

Agricultural policy in Liechtenstein has the objective of achieving sustainable and market-oriented production, in accordance with the Agriculture Act of 2008. (...)

Under the previous agriculture policy framework (AP 2011), the DP (direct payment) budget was allocated to "general" DPs (80%) and "ecological" DPs (20%), which were tied to compliance with environmental criteria and animal welfare objectives. The DP scheme comprised a set of 13 measures, which were notified in terms of Green Box decoupled income support, regional assistance, or environmental programmes, as explained in detail in the last TPR. The new direct payment system is more complex. The new DP regime comprises seven categories of payments, each targeted to a specific policy objective, with a total of 21 measures (Table 4.1).

The main DP category is "payments for ensuring food security", for which about SwF 1.1 billion per year have been allocated, covering three types of support:
The "basic payment" for which virtually the entire agricultural area of 1 million hectares is eligible (SwF 900 per hectare), including permanent pastures [21] (...)

[21] The payment rate is SwF 450/ha on permanent pastures that are cultivated as bio-diversity areas.

(...) On the summer pasturing area (covering about 465,000 hectares), the "summer pasturing payments" have been maintained with environmental requirements for grazing livestock. The payments have been increased (except for sheep) to SwF 400 per livestock unit (up from SwF 320 under AP 2011).