Trade monitoring

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. The WTO operates the global system of trade rules and helps developing economies build their trade capacity. It also provides a forum for its members to negotiate trade agreements and to resolve the trade problems they face with each other.

The WTO is run by its member governments. All major decisions are made by the membership as a whole, either by ministers (who meet at least once every two years) or by their ambassadors or delegates (who meet regularly at the WTO’s headquarters in Geneva). Decisions are normally taken by consensus. The WTO Secretariat coordinates the activities of the WTO.

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.

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 produ Read More

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 Read More

A little over a decade has passed since the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008. Shortly after the collapse of the Lehman Brothers investment bank, an internal Secretariat Task Force was established by the WTO Director-General to monitor the trade-related developments associated with the crisis. Meeting in London in early 2009, the G20 Leaders mandated the WTO, together with other international bodies, to monitor and report publicly on G20 adhere Read More

In this paper, we investigate tourism-related policy approaches that WTO member countries adopted in the early weeks of the COVID-19 crisis. We highlight the need for stakeholders to coordinate their responses in order to mitigate the negative crisis effects and better prepare the sector for the future. In doing so, we explore the economic impact of potential tourism scenarios, underlining both the demand and supply side effects of the crisis.

This paper develops a set of time series models to provide short-term forecasts (6 to 18 months ahead) of international trade both at the global level and for selected regions. Our results compare favourably to other forecasts, notably by the International Monetary Fund, as measured by standard evaluation measures, such as the root mean square forecast error. In comparison to other models, our approach offers several methodological advantages, i Read More

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought considerable attention to trade in medical products, and specifically trade in products for prevention, testing and treatment. This study provides a comprehensive overview of trade and tariffs imposed on medical goods in general, many of which appear to be in severe shortage as a result of the current crisis. The purpose of this note is to provide factual information on how these goods are traded globally.

The WTO Secretariat has published a new information note on trade-related issues for COVID-19 vaccine production, manufacturing and deployment. The note, entitled “Developing and delivering COVID-19 vaccines around the world,” explores how trade policy can play its part in ensuring the rapid roll-out of vaccines against COVID-19.

This paper reviews the main developments of trade and related policies and measures in the Asia and Pacific region during the 30 years since establishment, in 1989, of the Trade Policy Review Mechanism (TPRM). The objectives of the TPRM include facilitating the smooth functioning of the multilateral trading system by enhancing the transparency of WTO Members' trade policies.

Economic projections for the world economy, particularly in relation to the construction of Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) baselines, are generally rather conservative and take scant account of the wide range of possible evolutions authorized by the underlying economic mechanisms considered. Against this background, we adopt an ‘open mind’ to the projection of world trade trajectories. Taking a 2035 horizon, we examine how world trade patter Read More