Trade monitoring reports

Countries generally resisted domestic pressures to erect trade barriers during 2012, although some of them put in place new trade-restrictive measures. Economic uncertainties and high levels of unemployment continued to feed domestic protectionist pressures. The global economy encountered increasingly strong headwinds during 2012 that hampered world trade and output growth. The WTO Secretariat revised downward its forecast for world trade growth in 2012 to 2.5 per cent from its forecast of 3.7 per cent early in the year.