Trade monitoring
Commerce et développement
Le Comité du commerce et du développement de l’OMC a mis en oeuvre un certain nombre de décisions adoptées à la neuvième Conférence ministérielle à Bali, y compris celle de tenir une première session sur le mécanisme de surveillance pour le traitement spécial et différencié en faveur des pays en développement. Il a discuté des activités d’assistance technique et de formation de l’OMC et a reçu les notifications des Membres relatives à l’accès aux marchés pour les pays en développement et les pays les moins avancés (PMA). Il a également ouvert des discussions sur la manière de procéder à l’examen du Mécanisme pour la transparence des arrangements commerciaux préférentiels.
Globalization and economic volatility
Businesses and households face substantial idiosyncratic and aggregate economic risk. As a general principle, economic risk for businesses reflects the myriad of factors that impact the profitability of the business, while for individuals economic risk reflects the myriad of factors that impact the earnings and employment outcomes of household members. While aggregate risk gets most of the headlines, the volatility of profitability and income that an individual business or household faces is dominated by idiosyncratic risk. That is, of the plethora of economic shocks impacting the outcomes for households and businesses, the evidence shows that the variance of idiosyncratic shocks is at least an order of magnitude larger than the variance of aggregate shocks. For example, whether a business is profitable reflects primarily idiosyncratic factors such as product quality, product mix and choice of technology, broadly defined, including the choice of business organization, factor mix, location and business-specific productivity, and cost and demand factors. Similarly, for households, earnings and employment outcomes primarily reflect the education and skills of household members as well as whether household members are well matched in the labour market.
Rapport de la Communauté de l’Afrique de l’Est (CAE)
Le Traité instituant la Communauté de l’Afrique de l’Est (CAE) est entré en vigueur le 7 juillet 2000, et a donné un nouveau départ à la CAE, qui compte six États membres: le Burundi, le Kenya, l’Ouganda, le Rwanda, le Soudan du Sud et la Tanzanie. L’Union douanière de la CAE est entrée en vigueur le 1er janvier 2005 et le Marché commun le 1er juillet 2010. L’anglais est la langue de communication officielle entre les structures politiques de la Communauté.
Overview
From the WTO perspective, the year 2001 was above all the year of the Doha Ministerial Conference, a turning point in the history of the WTO and in relations between developed and developing countries. In light of the tragic events of 11 September and its aftermath, the mere fact that the Ministerial Conference could be held at Doha, Qatar, in November 2001, must be seen as a success. That Ministers, in addition, could agree the launch of a new round of trade negotiations, is a recognition of the importance to the global economy of stimulating trade and development. It also brought to an end the uncertainty created by the frustrating failure at Seattle two years earlier. Last year was also one in which we concluded the accession of China, Chinese Taipei, Lithuania and Moldova to the WTO, welcoming more than one quarter of the world’s population into our membership.