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Friday, March 29, 2024

Senior UN official warns against increasingly unilateral trade measures

Mr Liu Zhenmin, a senior United Nations official has warned again the increasingly unilateral trade measures that are challenging the multilateral trade system.

According to Mr Liu Zhenmin, the Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, despite the improved economic growth, the risks to economic outlook are rising. Incremental progress as in the past will earn short term progress but will come at the expense of long term deterioration.

He said, “Efforts are needed to revitalize a global partnership for sustainable development to build a universal, rules-based, open, non-discriminatory and equitable multilateral trading system,” he said during a high-level policy dialogue with international financial and trade institutions, held at the UN Headquarters in New York. Stronger economic growth in itself is not sufficient to ensure that these gains are widely shared”.

Projections for economic growth, international trade and other trend challenges were presented by IMF, WTO, UNCTAD and DESA.

The latest forecast from DESA’s World Economic Situation and Prospects indicate that the world economic output is expected to expand by 3.2% in 2018 and 2019. The improvements reflects the uptick in the growth outlook for developed economies in 2018 which comes at the strength of acceleration of broadly favorable investment conditions, wage growth and the short term impact of fiscal stimulus package in the United States.

The positive macro-economic conditions formulate a basis for policymakers to take measures which helps make meaningful progress towards sustainable development goals which eradicate poverty and hunger as well as protects the environment and offers opportunity to raise living standards on a broader scale esp. in developing regions.

Liu further added that the recent acceleration in economic growth also comes with an environmental cost, and at the current rate, efforts to combat climate change are insufficient to meet the objectives of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which commits countries to keep the rise in carbon emissions from the dawn of the industrial era, to below 2 degrees Celsius.

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