Pero
“la naturaleza del comercio está cambiando”
Ginebra, Suiza, 25 de septiembre del 2012.-
En el discurso que pronunció ante la 59° período de sesiones de la Junta de
Comercio y Desarrollo de la UNCTAD el 25 de septiembre de 2012, el Director
General Pascal Lamy dijo que “debemos seguir centrándonos en nuestro objetivo
fundamental, común a la OMC y la UNCTAD: ayudar a los países en desarrollo a
beneficiarse de la economía globalizada “. Añadió que: “la forma en que se
producen y comercializan las mercancías (hoy) incide en cómo podemos optimizar
la contribución del comercio al crecimiento y el desarrollo.” El Director
General dijo lo siguiente:
Secretary-General
Panitchpakdi Supachai,
Honourable Ministers,
Ambassador Seilenthal,
Ambassadors,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I am very pleased to address this fifty-ninth session
of the Trade and Development Board on the subject of the ’Evolution of the
international trading system and its trends from a development perspective’.
The global economy remains fragile. Recovery from the
financial and economic crisis remains sluggish and risks for the near future
are still on the downside. In fact, just last week the WTO revised its
projections for trade growth in volume from the spring forecast of 3.7 per cent
growth to 2.5 per cent, which is a more than expected downgrade. Even the
picture for South-South trade is less buoyant than before. If the crisis worsens,
it will certainly put at risk some of the developmental gains of recent years.
Persistent high unemployment is testing many
governments’ resolve about keeping markets open. Small trade restrictions are
accumulating like bad cholesterol, and the danger is that the benefits of trade
openness will be incrementally undermined. The WTO’s and UNCTAD’s monitoring of
trade-restrictive measures are a useful means to help members keep their
cholesterol levels under control. I encourage you within this UNCTAD forum to
pay attention to these developments.
What can we in the international community do to help
in the present circumstances?
First of all, we must remain focused on our primary
objective, a goal that the WTO and UNCTAD share: to help developing countries
benefit from the globalized economy to raise living standards. In essence, to
use trade as a conduit to achieve development that is both sustained and
sustainable.
The turbulence in the global economy has not changed
this priority. However, the nature of trade is changing. We are increasingly
trading in tasks and in value-added and through value chains which are
increasing in both breadth and in depth. The way that goods or services are
produced and traded has implications for how we can best maximise trade’s
contribution to growth and development.
Of course, regional and global value chains are not
new. The journalist Nayan Chanda tells us that by the 11th century AD, regular
trade had evolved in which African ivory was shipped to India, where craftsmen
carved it into jewellery for export to Europe. That is a global value chain.
Manchester’s 19th century textile mills were fed with cotton from India, the
United States and elsewhere. The cloth produced there was exported throughout
the world.
The pattern in itself is not new but what is new are
their unprecedented scale, scope, sophistication and speed. Today, trade in
intermediate products accounts for more than half of world merchandise exports.
Shrinking transport and communication costs, underpinned by a more predictable
trade policy environment, have enabled industrial production to be fragmented
across regions as never before. Particularly for smaller developing countries
but also for small and medium companies, global value chains are good news. Why?
Because they lower the bar for entry into the global economy as they do not
need to have a full-fledged vertically integrated industry to penetrate the
value chain. And this phenomenon is by
no means exclusive to high-tech products. This replacement of “trade in goods”
with “trade in tasks” has major implications for how we think about trade.
The way we measure trade also has to change. Our
traditional methodology assigns the total commercial value of an import to a
single country of origin. When applied to “made in the world” products, this
methodology can exaggerate, and does exaggerate if we look at the initial
approximations of trade in value added,
bilateral trade balances and under-state where value addition occurs
which is what matters for jobs.
Inflated bilateral trade numbers can inflame
anti-trade sentiment. Worse, they can cause countries to assess their trade
interests incorrectly - and bad measurements tend to lead to bad policy. The
WTO is working with national and international institutions such as UNCTAD, the
OECD, the World Bank, networks of academics and statisticians to develop trade
statistics that better reflect the reality of trade today. As was discussed at
the Seminar on Global Value Chains held in Beijing recently, the first batch of
numbers on trade in value added will appear at the end of the year
A second set of changes is even more relevant to our
discussion today: the rise of global value chains requires governments to
re-think how best to pursue trade-led growth. Government policies can help
create a virtuous circle of increasing international competitiveness and trade
flows, yielding steady development dividends. Public-private co-operation can
encourage foreign direct investment, which often brings with it improved
technology. Investments in infrastructure, coupled with efficient business and
support services, can help deepen ties between countries, making it easier to
fragment production regionally. Reduced transaction costs further boost the
competitiveness of domestic firms. Active labour policies, education and
innovation policies must be part of the mix.
In short, catching the opportunities presented by
global value chains requires smart government interventions which need to be
rethought in light of this new background.
But the trade narrative also needs to change. The
traditional approach to trade was “exports good, imports bad”. The political economy of trade policymaking
in many countries reflects this: governments instinctively work to bolster
exporters’ market access while trying to protect import-competing sectors,
whatever the merits of this approach were a few decades ago. This is ill-suited
to a world in which the import content of exported goods is 40 per cent -
double the level from 20 years ago, and which might be 60 per cent 20 years
from now. There is a need to switch the mind-set from the old school need to
export to cover imports to the new school of thought which recognizes that we
need to import to cover exports.
What can the multilateral trading system do to smooth
the path through the world economy? How can we encourage the development of new
trade flows? And how can developing countries be helped up the value chain to
create more growth and jobs? These are all relevant questions worth looking
into and we did last week at a seminar co-organized by MOFCOM, UNCTAD, OECD and
the WTO in Beijing.
We will look at the capacity-building side of this at
next July’s Fourth Global Aid for Trade Review which will look into how we can
leverage Aid for Trade to unlock the potential offered by global value chains.
The consequences for trade policy-making and domestic policy adjustment to this
pattern are also true for Aid for Trade.
Aid for Trade can help countries develop the
competitive, well-regulated logistics and connective services sectors that can
be as important as physical infrastructure to their trade competitiveness. Aid
for Trade projects can also help developing country producers upgrade
equipment, improve marketing activities, and comply with international standards
and other non-tariff requirements, helping them move higher up on their
respective value chains. The Enhanced Integrated Framework can play this role
for the least-developed countries, for whom the costs of joining value chains
as compared to emerging countries remains relatively high. We have seen this in
the case of rum in the Caribbean, flowers in Eastern Africa, cashews in
Mozambique and mangoes in Mali.
Trade facilitation is another area which can help
unlock the potential of global value chains. Stripping away red tape at customs
points, and enhancing transparency and predictability at borders would lead to
considerable savings in time and costs of transacting trade.
Action taken at the regional level to facilitate trade
could also go a long way to encouraging the development of regional and global
value chains. This is particularly true for Africa, where manufacturers are
often stymied by poor road, rail and port infrastructure, by high and
unpredictable transportation costs, by tariffs and non-tariff measures and by
red tape. According to surveys conducted by the UN Economic Commission for
Africa, a typical customs transaction in Africa involves an array of 20 to 30
different parties, 40 documents, 200 data elements (many of which are repeated multiple
times). This is not the route to “Factory Africa”.
The African Union is taking steps to remedy the
situation. African governments this year adopted a declaration on “Boosting
Intra-African Trade”, pledging to improve infrastructure and reduce trade
barriers and this is very much in synergy with the trade facilitation agenda. I
see this as a very encouraging move.
We have also heard the same message coming from the
recent Ministerial conference of Land-locked Developing Countries in Almaty.
I do, therefore, believe that concluding a WTO deal on
trade facilitation, sooner rather than later, can result in significant cuts to
the costs of trading today.
Let me, in closing, raise another important factor in
international production chains: non-tariff measures (NTMs). The broad decline
in tariff levels has meant that non-tariff measures, such as technical
standards, health and safety requirements, and services regulation, now loom
larger in international trade. This year’s edition of the WTO World Trade Report
focused on this issue. We found that the nature of NTMs has shifted: the
traditional protection-motivated quotas and safeguards have increasingly given
way to a precaution-oriented emphasis on health, safety, environmental quality
and other social considerations. These concerns are wholly legitimate and
cannot, indeed should not, be blindly trumped by a desire to keep trade
completely unobstructed. Contrary to the universe of tariffs where the
objective of the trade negotiations has been to move to zero tariffs, this
cannot be the same for NTMs. The aim should be to create a level playing field
on NTMS although this can be more politically challenging. The next focus in
decades to come would be how to address barriers meant to protect not the
producers but the consumers.
That said, the nature of the measures taken to pursue
public policy objectives, and the way those measures are administered, can have
widely varying effects on trade, both positive and negative. We can agree that
it is desirable to ensure that NTMs do not increase trade costs more than the
minimum necessary to achieve their objective. Similarly, it is reasonable to
argue that NTMs should not be constructed in ways that unduly favour domestic
interests. Yet, in light of the complex objectives and policies in play where
NTMs are concerned, finding the right balance will require cooperation and
dialogue.
We can start by improving transparency about existing
NTMs. At the WTO, we have created the Integrated Trade Intelligence Portal
(I-TIP), a one-stop shop for accessing all information notified to the WTO by
members, including NTMs, tariffs, trade remedy use and trade statistics. For
the first time, it will be possible to access the whole universe of the trade
regime of a country. We intend to continue to work with UNCTAD to shed further
light on NTMs and explore ways to preserve the gains from trade without
sacrificing public policy objectives - a debate that is likely to increase in
years to come.
There is also one issue about NTMs that is entirely
uncontroversial: the importance of capacity-building, whether for helping
developing country exporters comply with NTMs in important markets or for
helping governments participate in standard-setting. I encourage UNCTAD with
its specific focus on development to have a closer, wider and deeper look at
the universe of standard-setting and the places where this is done, including
private standards, and what the development community can do in order to bring
a developing country input into this debate that rebalances the framing of
these NTMs. I suggest that you could focus your trade reflection on this impact
for the future.
In conclusion, I want to reiterate that even though
the Doha Development Agenda remains at an impasse, there are realistic,
short-term concrete steps that can be taken to bolster trade-led growth and
development, enabled by global value chains. The recent decision on WTO
accession for least-developed countries (LDCs) and the work on the Information
Technology Agreement and the Government Procurement Agreement and even the APEC
environmental goods agreement show that when the will is there amongst WTO
members we can collectively deliver. This same will is required in trade
facilitation and other areas of importance to WTO members, especially to the
LDCs. This includes the special and differential treatment leg of the Doha
Round which is a low-hanging fruit that we can work to reap together.
I hope that your deliberations over this period will
help to further engender this will as we continue to promote a multilateral
trading system built on the premise of trade as a critical input in attaining
development.
I thank you.
Fuente: OMC