Ukraine
Trade Policy Review: Ukraine 2016
“Trade Policy Reviews” analyse the trade policies and practices of each member of the WTO. The reviews consist of three parts: an independent report by the WTO Secretariat a report by the government and the concluding remarks by the Chair of the WTO’s Trade Policy Review Body. The opening section - “key trade facts” - provides a visual overview of the WTO member's major exports/imports main export destinations origins for its imports and other key data. This edition looks into the trade practices of Kingdom of Ukraine.
The Crisis in Ukraine
This note examines the implications of the crisis in Ukraine for global trade and development. It highlights the importance of the supplies of food energy and certain industrial inputs from Russia and Ukraine and explores how the war is causing severe risks to food and energy security as well as exacerbating supply chain difficulties. Simulations from the WTO Global Trade Model indicate that global GDP and trade growth could be reduced by up to 1.3 and 2.2 percentage points respectively with effects concentrated in Europe and Africa. This note further shows that if the war were to cause a disintegration of the global economy into separate blocs the income losses would be severe especially for emerging and developing economies. This highlights the importance of the rules-based multilateral trading system not least because the WTO provides functions that can help to cushion the impact of the crisis.
One year of war in Ukraine
This note examines how the war in Ukraine has affected global trade. It looks at how exports from Russia and Ukraine have evolved over the past year. It then analyses how countries highly dependent on Russian or Ukrainian exports of agricultural and primary goods have responded to the crisis and how prices and trade in goods greatly affected by the war have developed. These impacts reveal the repercussions of the war for developing economies and demonstrate the resilience of the multilateral trading system. This note highlights that a widespread push to reconsolidate global supply chains based on geopolitical considerations would come at a high cost. Reduced growth prospects could be particularly large for many developing countries especially least-developed countries. Their opportunity costs of foregoing further multilateral liberalization and moving to geopolitical rivalry instead could amount to 11.3 per cent of real GDP – placing further strain on the fragile situation triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Introduction
The Trade Policy Review Mechanism (TPRM) was first established on a trial basis by the GATT contracting parties in April 1989. The Mechanism became a permanent feature of the World Trade Organization under the Marrakesh Agreement which established the WTO in January 1995.