Trade monitoring

Le Rapport sur le commerce mondial de cette année présente une analyse nouvelle et approfondie du commerce préférentiel. Le choix de ce thème est lié à deux tendances importantes dans les relations commerciales internationales, qui ont toutes deux des implications d’envergure pour le système commercial multilatéral. La première, et la plus manifeste, est l’augmentation constante du nombre d’accords commerciaux préférentiels (ACPr) qui occupent une place de plus en plus grande. Au cours des 20 dernières années, leur nombre a plus que quadruplé, avec aujourd’hui quelque 300 ACPr en vigueur. Rien ne permet de penser que le nombre d’ACPr cessera de croître ou qu’ils ne feront pas partie durablement du paysage des relations commerciales internationales. Par ailleurs, la teneur des ACPr continue d’évoluer et de s’approfondir, reflétant des changements importants dans l’économie mondiale. Cela soulève aussi des questions cruciales quant à l’orientation et à la portée de l’OMC et à la valeur que les gouvernements attachent aux relations commerciales mondiales.

The period 2006-2010 was a period of high and sustained growth for the Uruguayan economy, which exceeded its potential growth rate - estimated at 4 per cent annually - during five of the six years. GDP grew at an average rate of 6.2 per cent, far surpassing the historical averages. As a result, per capita GDP doubled during the period, reaching 11,996 dollars in 2010. This trend was maintained throughout the period and was not reversed by the global crisis of 2009: although the GDP growth rate fell to 2.6 per cent, it recovered significantly in the following year. The Government expects the growth rate to exceed its potential rate once again in 2011. All along, the main driving force behind this growth was domestic demand.

Seychelles se adhirió a la OMC en abril de 2015 y unos meses más tarde, en noviembre, lo hizo Kazajstán. Los conjuntos de documentos de la adhesión del Afganistán y Liberia fueron aprobados en diciembre de 2015 en la Décima Conferencia Ministerial de la OMC.

En 2016, el Comité de Comercio y Medio Ambiente (CCMA) examinó una amplia gama de cuestiones ambientales relacionadas con el comercio, entre ellas, el cambio climático, la reforma de las subvenciones a los combustibles fósiles, la gestión de los productos químicos y los desechos, el comercio de fauna y flora silvestres, la silvicultura y la pesca. También se facilitó al Comité información actualizada sobre la Base de Datos sobre Medio Ambiente (BDMA) de la OMC, las disposiciones ambientales de los acuerdos comerciales regionales (ACR) y las negociaciones relativas al Acuerdo sobre Bienes Ambientales.

This book is the outcome of joint work by the Secretariats of UNCTAD and the WTO. Its six chapters were written collaboratively by academics and staff of the two organizations. The volume aims to help researchers and policy-makers expand their knowledge of quantitative economic methods and data sources for trade policy analysis. The need for the book is based on the belief that good policy needs to be backed by good analysis. By bringing together the most widely used approaches for trade policy analysis in a single volume, the book allows the reader to compare methodologies and to select the best-suited to address the issues of today.

The World Trade Organization came into being in 1995, as the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which had been established (1947) in the wake of the Second World War. The WTO’s main objective is the establishment of rules for Members’ trade policy which help international trade to expand with a view to raising living standards. These rules foster non-discrimination, transparency and predictability in the conduct of trade policy.

This section looks at the empirical evidence on the effect of trade on wages and employment and addresses the following key questions: what is the evidence of the impact of import competition and offshoring on the level of wages and employment? What is the impact of increased market access for exports and the availability of cheaper imported inputs on employment? How can varied empirical evidence across countries be reconciled? How does the functioning of the labour market affect outcomes? How large are trade-induced adjustment costs? This section focuses particularly on wages and employment because research on other dimensions of labour markets, such as employment stability and security, is much less developed due to lack of cross-country data and thus does not allow for a comparison of how trade and technology play out on these other variables.