Investigación económica y análisis de políticas comerciales

WTO membership has long been an integral part of the overall strategic objectives of Afghanistan. For a post-conflict, landlocked and least-developed economy, joining the WTO was perceived as an opportunity to achieve economic stability, improve regional security and cooperation, alleviate poverty and achieve peace. Afghanistan has been on an eleven-year journey to integrate into the multilateral trading system. Its WTO accession process, described in this chapter, was a learning experience in which Afghanistan’s governmental and academic institutions, private sector and civil society all upgraded their capacity, using this accession as a catalyst to accelerate structural reforms and strengthen market instruments. The enormous reforms accomplished in this process have allowed Afghanistan to build a more favourable trade and investment regime, with effective laws and trade policies based on the WTO agreements. This chapter sheds light on the accession process and the accomplished domestic transformation and identifies ways forward to maximize the benefits of Afghanistan’s WTO membership as a tool for cementing its long-standing commitment to an open economy, rule of law, good governance and international cooperation.

Although the private sector is not, in most cases, directly involved in negotiations for accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), its needs and positions are addressed through consultative mechanisms organized at the national level by WTO members. These mechanisms represent a two-way information channel: the relevant authorities can obtain the foundations to formulate and defend national negotiating positions, while the private sector has an avenue to present sectoral interests as well as any relevant trade concerns. In acknowledging the influence of the private sector, the objective of this chapter is to examine the existing public-private consultation mechanisms in selected WTO members, as well as the evidence of private sector interests in recent reports of accession working parties. The analysis suggests that the influence of the business sector is embedded in accession protocols. Accession agreements include results obtained through trade policy consultation mechanisms, which vary in the degree of formality and sophistication. Ideally, the consultation and outreach mechanisms established by acceding governments to promote support for WTO accession should be strengthened throughout the WTO membership. Such mechanisms should continue to function once accessions have been completed to support the implementation of commitments, set further negotiating priorities and participate in trade policy reviews and dispute settlement. The support and contributions of the private sector were instrumental to successfully achieve recent multilateral results, notably the Trade Facilitation Agreement and the expansion of the Information Technology Agreement.

In the last few months trade has contracted more than at any time since the 1930s, reflecting the dramatic global economic downturn provoked in the first instance by the collapse of major financial institutions. Trade growth will be strongly negative this year and we are unlikely to see sustained economic growth until 2010. This adversity is severely testing the policy ingenuity of governments across the globe, and in today’s interdependent world, their willingness to make common cause in addressing shared challenges. Effective international cooperation and open markets are as vital today as they have ever been.

Los recursos naturales son fundamentales para la vida humana. Productos no renovables como el petróleo y el gas natural se transforman en energía, indispensable para la producción de prácticamente cualquier otro producto o servicio. Recursos renovables como los bosques, el pescado y los acuíferos, figuran entre los activos naturales más valiosos del mundo. Si se gestionan de forma adecuada, pueden proporcionar también un conjunto inacabable de productos que mejoran enormemente la calidad de la vida humana. Los recursos naturales representan una parte cada vez más importante del comercio mundial, y en 2008 supusieron alrededor del 24 por ciento del comercio total de mercancías. El volumen de este comercio se ha mantenido estable durante el último decenio, pero su valor ha crecido el 20 por ciento anual.

La croissance du commerce et de la production a repris au second semestre de 2009 après une contraction sans précédent au début de l’année. La reprise au premier trimestre de 2010 a été insuffisante pour permettre un retour aux niveaux d’avant la crise. L’OMC prévoit que la reprise se poursuivra en 2010 par rapport aux faibles niveaux de 2009, ce qui devrait inverser, mais en partie seulement, l’effet de la contraction des échanges. Un fait positif en 2009 a été l’absence de renforcement notable des obstacles au commerce imposés par les Membres de l’OMC en réponse à la crise, et ce malgré un fort taux de chômage dans de nombreux pays. C’est en partie grâce à l’OMC que l’on a évité un retour au protectionnisme qui avait tant aggravé la situation économique dans les années 1930.

El Informe sobre el comercio mundial 2020 ha sido elaborado bajo la responsabilidad general de Xiaozhun Yi, Director General Adjunto de la OMC, y Robert Koopman, Director de la División de Estudios Económicos y Estadística. El Informe ha sido coordinado por Marc Auboin y Ankai Xu. Los autores del Informe son Marc Auboin, Marc Bacchetta, Cosimo Beverelli, Eddy Bekkers, Kian Cassehgari Posada, Emmanuelle Ganne, John Hancock, Kathryn Lundquist, Gabrielle Marceau, José-Antonio Monteiro, Roberta Piermartini, Stela Rubínová, Victor Stolzenburg, Ankai Xu y Qing Ye (División de Estudios Económicos y Estadística).

Growth in world output and trade decelerated in 2007. Weaker demand in the developed economies reduced global economic growth to 3.4 per cent from 3.7 per cent, roughly the average rate recorded over the last decade. At some 7 per cent, growth in the developing regions was nearly three times the rate recorded in the developed regions and the contribution of the developing countries to global output growth in 2007 exceeded 40 per cent. Economic expansion in the least-developed countries fully matched the growth rate recorded by developing countries as a group in 2007, sustaining a pattern that has been maintained since 2000.

The proliferation of regional trade agreements (RTAs) around the world has focused policy attention to preferential rules of origin (ROOs). The concerns voiced over ROOs are two-fold: restrictiveness and divergence. Restrictive ROOs can introduce undue barriers to trade between RTA members and non-members, thus dampening RTAs’ trade-creating potential. Divergences in ROOs across regimes can increase the transaction costs for countries and companies dealing on two or more RTA fronts simultaneously, especially when they are unable to cumulate production and inputs across agreements. These two issues are intricately linked: divergence matters more when ROOs are binding – i.e. when restrictiveness is consequential for economic decisions and affects firms’ production. Non-binding ROOs around the world would obliterate the importance of divergence.

El progreso económico genera perturbaciones económicas, y siempre ha habido una compensación inherente e inevitable entre los beneficios del crecimiento, por un lado, y los costos del ajuste, por otro. La época actual no es una excepción. La expansión de la economía mundial, impulsada por los avances tecnológicos y la apertura de los mercados, está aumentando el bienestar y mejorando las condiciones de vida de miles de millones de personas en todo el mundo; pero también se traduce en cambios económicos, desplazamientos y perturbaciones, lo que crea una enorme presión para que los individuos y las sociedades se ajusten y adapten si quieren seguir el ritmo del progreso económico y participar en los beneficios que genera.

This Report has shown that it is important to distinguish standards according to their function. The conceptual framework adopted in the Report distinguished standards related to network externalities, imperfect information and negative production or consumption externalities.

En la presente sección examinamos cómo puede el comercio de servicios ayudar a los países a lograr un crecimiento rápido e inclusivo. En la sección C.1 se examina y se intenta cuantificar en qué medida el comercio de servicios beneficia a la economía y promueve el crecimiento. En la sección C.2 se analiza la contribución del comercio de servicios a la mejora de la competitividad de las empresas nacionales no solo en el sector de los servicios, sino también en el manufacturero. En la sección C.3 se analiza la forma en que el comercio de servicios promueve la inclusión en diversos aspectos, por ejemplo en términos de competencias, cuestiones de género y localización de las actividades económicas. En la sección C.4 se exponen las conclusiones.

The World Trade Report 2017 was prepared under the general responsibility of Xiaozhun Yi, WTO Deputy Director-General, and Robert Koopman, Director of the Economic Research and Statistics Division. This year the report was coordinated by Marc Bacchetta and José-Antonio Monteiro. The authors of the report are Marc Bacchetta, Cosimo Beverelli, John Hancock, Mark Koulen, Viktor Kummritz, José-Antonio Monteiro, Roberta Piermartini, Stela Rubinova and Robert Teh (Economic Research and Statistics Division).

The expansion of global value chains (GVCs) has plateaued since the global financial crisis of 2008–2009 due to the slowdown in hyperglobalization (Chapter 1; Antràs 2020a; World Bank 2020). Old and new risks to GVCs, as well as shocks, threaten the continued viability of these chains. The risks and shocks include extreme weather events, trade and technology wars, increased protectionism, geopolitical tensions, and COVID-19. IMF (2021a) defines risk as the effect of uncertainty on objectives—and by inducing uncertainty, shocks constitute an underlying source of risks, along with limited information and an imprecise understanding of the sources and mechanisms triggering shocks, which contributes to uncertainty. Given all this, the first three sections of this chapter are taken up by an overview of the sources, mechanisms, and effects of the three main types of meta-risks: geopolitical, environmental, and those stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic.1 While addressing primarily the implications of the three risks for GVCs, these sections also take note of reverse causal effects, where GVCs exacerbate those risks.2 The chapter then examines the relative resilience of GVCs to shocks depending on the nature and magnitude of the shock as well as on GVC features, industry and firm topographies, availability of substitutions, degree of transactional stickiness, and type of shock (geopolitical, environmental, COVID-19). The subsequent section examines mutual interactions across all three risks and their compounded effects. The chapter concludes with policy recommendations and a discussion on future directions in the burgeoning analysis of risks to GVCs.

Building economic resilience requires an understanding of economic challenges and opportunities, as well as the ability to anticipate, evaluate and manage risks. Although trade can spread and magnify shocks, it can help countries prepare for, cope with and recover from shocks. Initial conditions, the nature of the shock and policy choices, including the level of diversification, are important in determining what role trade will play.

Charles Dickens’ phrase “it was the best of times; it was the worst of times” is for many Indonesian workers an apt summary of their experience during the early 2000s. While the national economy and especially its resource-exporting sectors enjoyed trade-driven growth of unprecedented magnitude and duration, millions of blue-collar workers and labor market entrants found themselves paradoxically sidelined from well-paid jobs in manufacturing, and instead forced to seek livelihoods in low-paid, low-skill service sector jobs. This happened at a time when many Asian countries, led by the People’s Republic of China, were enjoying (continued) expansion of manufacturing trade by participating in global production networks, which in turn created better employment opportunities for their less-skilled agricultural workforces. For many Indonesians, on the other hand, the boom was a period of stagnating real wages and diminished earnings prospects, even as national income and spending surged ahead and overall expectations for the future became increasingly bright. For workers, the consequence of job displacement due to structural change would have been particularly severe during this time.

Cette section examine les effets de la technologie sur le niveau et la composition de l’emploi et des salaires. En augmentant la productivité des facteurs de production, le progrès technologique repousse la frontière des possibilités de production d’une économie, de sorte que la même quantité de produits peut être obtenue avec moins de ressources, ou une plus grande quantité avec les mêmes ressources.

The emergence of democracy in Indonesia as a result of the economic crisis in the late 1990s has brought significant changes to the policy-making process in the country. The reform advocates who emerged following the downfall of the authoritarian Suharto regime saw liberalization and engagement with the global economy as key to advancing economic reform in Indonesia. While recognizing the importance of concluding the global trade negotiations under the auspices of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Indonesia also remains committed to pursuing liberalization at the regional level through its membership of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Recently, Indonesia has also engaged in bilateral preferential trade agreements (PTAs), in part due to the stalling of the Doha Round negotiations, but also because the pursuit of PTAs by Indonesia’s immediate neighbours has generated fear among government and economic actors about the possible loss of competitiveness in key export markets.

WTO accession still holds a magnetic attraction for non-members. Why is this so, in spite of the challenges faced by the organisation, conclusions by analysts of deadlock in the Doha Development Agenda, assessments that trade policy action has shifted elsewhere to preferential trade arrangements (bilateral and regional trade agreements, including more recently, ‘mega-regionals’) and repeated forecasts about the WTO’s ‘irrelevance’ and ‘unravelling’? Systemically, what have WTO accessions contributed to the rules-based trading system through their processes, procedures, best practices and results? What effects have accession negotiations had on domestic reforms in Article XII members? Are there broader lessons for the WTO? This chapter demonstrates that, after the coming into force of the WTO in 1995, results from WTO accession negotiations served to update trade rules continuously (including influencing WTO jurisprudence), enlarged market access opportunities, provided acceding governments with a critical multilateral instrument for legislation-based domestic reforms, and supported geopolitical and geo-economic transformations from centrally planned to market-based economies, the rule of law and good governance. The changes associated with these results were evident from the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. The evidence strongly suggests that the accession process and its results have established a legal framework for international cooperation, contributed to the global economic transformation of command to market economies and provided a platform for Article XII members to implement their development and modernisation priorities. Overall, the legal, economic and trade policy impact from the deposited Accession Protocols and the process of accession negotiations per se have not only reinforced existing rules and raised the systemic bar, with associated catalytic effect for domestic reforms, but have also staked out the parameters for the future of the rules-based trading system, including a future WTO work programme.

Ukraine embarked on its road to WTO accession in 1992, a year after it had declared its independence. Fourteen years of intense work, steep learning, persistence, political will and flexibility were to follow. Ukraine faced many immediate challenges and tasks in strengthening its independence and creating and establishing the national institutions required by an independent state, moving away from a centralised economy and reinforcing foreign policy. Ukraine had to totally eliminate its post-Soviet legacy. A new system of national government and administration had to be established. Democracy, the rule of law and a free market became the guiding principles for political, social and economic life. WTO accession implied increased competition, which turned out to be quite painful for some companies. However, the negative scenarios foreseen by some researchers did not occur; in fact, the accession offered the national economy new incentives for structural and long-lasting change. However, WTO membership is not simply a recipe for future happiness. While it stimulates trade and business environments, members must still work within the multilateral system to keep up to date.

En esta sección se presenta un panorama de la utilización de las subvenciones tanto a nivel mundial como a distintos niveles de desglose geográfico y sectorial. Teniendo en cuenta la cantidad y la calidad de los datos disponibles, no es posible presentar un cuadro exhaustivo y sistemático de la incidencia de las subvenciones.

In the interest of accuracy, this publication uses the historical names of GATT contracting parties as they were used at the time of each dispute, e.g. Ceylon, Czechoslovakia, Hong Kong, the Federal Republic of Germany, Yugoslavia or the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Likewise, this publication makes reference to EEC-6, EEC-9, EEC-10 or EEC-12 to reflect different stages of enlargement of the European Economic Communities. It also refers to individual EEC member States (e.g. France, Italy, etc.) for cases when these countries acted in their own capacity.

This chapter explains how accession negotiations have helped to further the agricultural reform process by upgrading and deepening the existing multilateral rules on trade in agriculture. It provides a broad overview of the existing multilateral disciplines in the area of agriculture, as contained in the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA). Using the experience of the thirty-six concluded accessions, the chapter suggests that a number of commitments, such as extensive market access commitments, ambitious domestic support commitments and comprehensive bindings with regard to export duties, helped establish high benchmarks vis-à-vis the undertakings of the original members of the World Trade Organization (WTO). In market access, the commitments of acceded members are primarily in the form of reductions in tariff bindings, with a very limited use of tariff rate quotas. In domestic support, the commitments of the acceded members have been negotiated based on the respective recourse to such support during a recent three-year period, dependent on the timing of the individual accessions. These commitments are generally more ambitious than the corresponding commitments of the original members under the AoA, which were derived based on the domestic support policy framework existing in 1986–8. Similarly, in the field of export subsidies, the acceded governments’ ambitious efforts to eliminate these highly distorting subsidies helped to create a strong momentum in the broader agriculture negotiations, leading to the eventual agreement on the global elimination of agricultural export subsidies at the Nairobi Ministerial Conference in 2015.