Jambo Africa Online’s Senior Editorial Correspondent, Francois Fouche, brings us news snippets from around the world that impact on economic development in Africa…
It’s been said that the World Trade Organization (WTO) is like a bicycle – it needs forward movement or it will fall.
But there’s one big problem: getting 164 governments to pedal toward one destination.
Over its 26-year history, the WTO has a paltry record for notching wins and its members haven’t collectively moved forward on any issues for the better part of the past decade.
At a meeting scheduled in Geneva later this month, the world’s trade ministers have an opportunity to break their negotiating drought and hammer out a package of deals to show the beleaguered trade body is still relevant.
The WTO Director-General, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has urged nations to try to target two or three outcomes in the following areas:
- an agreement to curb harmful fishery subsidies;
- a framework to expand global trade in vaccines; and
- a pledge to reduce trade-distorting agricultural policies.
These are all broad multilateral issues on which WTO members have said they want to achieve progress, even if they disagree on the outcomes.
Then there’s a separate track of so-called plurilateral trade deals being negotiated among like-minded members that generally move faster than multilateral agreements because they circumvent the WTO’s consensus requirement.
The current raft of plurilateral discussions include:
- domestic regulation in services;
- investment facilitation;
- e-commerce;
- micro, small- and medium-sized enterprises;
- women empowerment;
- and the environment.
International businesses are focused on these items — particularly e-commerce, investment facilitation and services regulation — because they could quickly help ease the burden of cross-border commerce for some of the world’s most dynamic industries.
Of all these potential outcomes, there are only two things under consideration that really matter to people and the global trading system — and one of them hasn’t even been mentioned yet.
The first is trade and health. Almost two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, the virus is still killing thousands of people each day and most people living in the developing world have not received even one dose of a vaccine.
Okonjo-Iweala has called the inequality of vaccination distribution a “moral outrage” and has urged WTO members to use trade to help expand global access to life-saving drugs.
If WTO members can’t come to an agreement related to vaccines that would mark a clear negotiating failure, that would cement the WTO’s irrelevance in the minds of many.
Secondly, the WTO itself needs to be reformed. Its dispute-settlement system is paralyzed, its negotiating function is compromised and its monitoring function is under-performing.
Though all WTO members agree that something needs to be done, they’ve failed to agree to do anything about it so far.
So, this is a critical moment for the world economy, and according to former WTO Deputy Director-General Alan Wolff, the WTO ministerial is likely to be an “inflection point, towards either more multilateral cooperation or more fragmentation.”
Source: https://www.bloomberg.com