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Overview
The overall objective of the WTO is to help its members use trade as a means to raise living standards, create jobs and improve people’s lives.
Women’s Economic Empowerment
Aid for Trade supports developing and least-developed countries in building their trade capacity and in increasing their exports by turning market access opportunities into market presence. It does so by addressing four key areas: trade policy & regulations; economic infrastructure; building productive capacity; and trade-related adjustment.
The Treatment of Medical Products in Regional Trade Agreements
The WTO Secretariat has published a new report on the treatment of medical products in regional trade agreements (RTAs) amid current supply shortages caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The report examines the extent medical products are traded among preferential partners and the difference in liberalization rates within and outside these trade agreements.
Export Quality in Advanced and Developing Economies
This paper develops new estimates of export quality, far more extensive than previous efforts, covering 178 countries and hundreds of products during the period 1962—2010. It finds that quality upgrading is particularly rapid during the early stages of development, with the process largely completed as a country reaches upper middle-income status. There is significant cross-country heterogeneity in the growth rate of quality. Within any given product line, quality converges over time to the world frontier. Institutional quality, liberal trade policies, FDI inflows, and human capital all promote quality upgrading, although their impact varies across sectors. The results suggest that reducing barriers to entry into new sectors can allow economies to benefit from rapid quality convergence over time.
WTO Trade Monitoring Ten Years on Lessons Learned and Challenges Ahead
A decade has passed since the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008. Less than a month after the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers, an internal Secretariat Task Force was established by the WTO Director-General to monitor the trade related developments associated with the global financial crisis.
Trade Imbalances and Multilateral Trade Cooperation
Rising current account and merchandise trade imbalances marked the years before the global financial and economic crisis. These imbalances either contributed to or precipitated the crisis and to the extent that they create systemic risks, it is desirable that they be reduced. There are many factors related to macroeconomic, structural, exchange rate and financial policies that contributed to the imbalances. The inability to manage these issues at the international level reflects the “coherence gap” in global governance. This paper examines the contribution that the WTO can make in its three areas of activities — negotiations, rule-making and dispute settlement — to deal with trade imbalances and with the main factors leading to them, including exchange rate misalignments. First, market opening efforts in services, including in the area of financial services, can reduce policy-related distortions and market imperfections in surplus countries that lead to the build-up of unsustainable imbalances. Second, in the context of a broad international effort to coordinate macroeconomic, exchange rate and structural policies to deal with the roots of imbalances (the first-best solution), there is a general efficiency argument that could be made for the use of WTO-triggered trade actions to enforce cooperative behaviour towards rebalancing. Absent this first-best response, trade rules alone would not provide an efficient instrument to compensate for the weaknesses in international co-operation in macroeconomic, exchange rate and structural policies.