Tokio, Japón,
12 de octubre del 2012.- En la alocución que
pronunció el 12 de octubre de 2012 ante el Instituto de Investigaciones sobre
Economía, Comercio e Industria, en Tokio, el Director General, Pascal Lamy,
dijo que “sobre la base de la información disponible, y de confirmarse una
serie de supuestos, la OMC prevé que el crecimiento del comercio repunte
ligeramente hasta el 4,5 por ciento en 2013, con un aumento de las
exportaciones de las economías desarrolladas y en desarrollo del 3,3 por ciento
y el 5,7 por ciento, respectivamente, y un aumento de las importaciones del 3,4
por ciento y el 6,1 por ciento. Es evidente que el mundo sigue tratando de
salir de la crisis”, el director dijo:
Mr. Ishige,
Chairman of JETRO
Members of
the Research Institute
Ladies and
Gentlemen
I am very
pleased to be addressing you this morning and I look forward to a healthy
debate afterwards.
We are
living in a world undergoing profound transformation. The old theories and
hypotheses which governed the way we looked at trade in the twentieth century
require better calibration with the new reality of trade in the twenty-first
century. Research institutes such as the RIETI are crucial in leading and
encouraging an evidenced-based debate on the role that trade can play in the
global rebalancing effort.
The global
economic picture remains one marked by extreme turbulence. Growth rates remain
sluggish and global unemployment still remains far too high. New threats to
food security are growing and questions about how to effectively address
climate change remain. Just last month the WTO revised downwards its
projections for trade growth in volumes from the Spring forecast of 3.7 per
cent growth to 2.5 per cent which is a larger than expected downgrade.
There have
been some recent positive signals regarding measures to reinforce the euro and
boost growth in the United States. But the fact remains that the European
sovereign debt crisis has not yet retreated and this continues to have
implications for fiscal adjustment in the peripheral euro area economies and in
the developing country markets, particularly those in Africa, given their
strong trade links with Europe. Output and employment data coming out of the
United States continues to be below expectation while and industrial production
figures in China point to slower growth in that economy. Given that China is
the world’s largest exporter this has far reaching implications for the global
economic landscape.
Even though
based on current information, and holding a number of assumptions to task, the
WTO expects trade growth to modestly rebound to 4.5% in 2013 with exports of
developed and developing economies increasing by 3.3% and 5.7%, respectively
and imports increasing by 3.4% and 6.1%, it is clear that the world is still
working its way out of the crisis.
This all
confirms what we have intuitively known for some time. We remain caught in the
tailwinds of the crisis and it may be many more years before we can safely say
that we are in a sustained recovery mode. Global realities also confirm that we
have never been more interdependent. Like the mythical butterfly that flaps its
wings off the coast of Africa and causes hurricane force winds across the
Atlantic — actions taken in one country or region has implications — negative
or positive — on all other countries and regions.
This
knowledge of our growing interdependence must govern how we, collectively,
craft global trade and economic policies going forward. Our approach to global
governance must be better attuned to these intricate economic webs which
characterise twenty-first century trade and country policies. Instead of being
inward looking, we need to be global in outlook.
The
topography of the world is changing. It is no longer a simple equation of North
and South. The rise in influence and economic weight of the emerging economies
has shifted the balance of power — some would say from West to East, others
from the West to the rest. We are truly in a twenty first century multi-polar
world. Existentialists would call this an ‘age of transition’. Ricardians would
see this as a natural progression of comparative advantage while the
Westphalian model would see this as a breakdown of the order of the nation
state. I see this as the contemporary
form of multilateralism with notions of sovereignty being challenged by
realities of interdependence. I see this
as an opportunity. Opportunities for policy makers and researchers to take a
new look at the forces moving trade and politico-economic discourse.
For many
years scholars and economists have highlighted the role of ‘factory Asia’. The
dexterity which Asian markets showed at the beginning of the crisis cannot be
denied. The central role given to trade to energise growth in the global
slowdown was successful and proved that keeping markets open and goods and
services flowing was the correct recipe. However, this does not make Asia, and
indeed Japan, exempt from the continued global turmoil. Japanese exports have been mostly flat since
mid-2010, but recorded an 8.5% year-on-year increase in the second quarter of
2012 with imports also holding up relatively well. For China, although there
has been year-on-year growth in China’s merchandise trade flows in volume
terms, export growth dropped to 2.9% and import growth fell to 2.8% in the
first quarter of 2012 before rebounding slightly in the second quarter.
Provisional data suggests that third quarter results may be weaker still.
One
element, which if not sufficiently arrested, will continue to impact on growth
in Asia — protectionist policies in Asia’s export markets. Earlier this year
the UNCTAD-WTO-OECD report on trade and investment protectionism by G-20
economies found that governments were continuing to introduce new trade
restrictions, without stepping up the removal of older trade-restricting
measures. Hence, restrictions have continued to accumulate since October 2008.
The danger is that the benefits of trade openness will be slowly and
incrementally undermined. Some argue that this resort to protectionism is
understandable in an environment where, as reported by the ILO, ‘there is a
backlog of global unemployment of 200 million — with an increase of 27 million
since the start of the crisis’. But we know from experience that one
protectionist move invites others and we also know that protectionism does not
protect jobs. The ultimate result would be even weaker overall global demand,
exacerbating everyone’s employment problem.
In a world
where interdependence is the norm and no longer the exception and where Global
and Regional Value Chains are increasing in breadth and in depth, restricting
the flow of goods and services is counter-productive and with limited economic
rationale in the medium to long-term.
It is not
just the flows of trade which are changing, but it is also the very nature of
trade which is transforming. The world is increasingly trading in tasks and in
value-added and the way that goods and services are produced and traded has
implications for the policies that we develop to best maximise trade’s
contribution to growth and development. The WTO has been working closely with
academics, research institutes and policy makers, including in Japan, and with
other organisations such as the OECD to better present the true picture of
trade in the twenty-first century. With trade in intermediate products
accounting for more than half of world merchandise exports, with the import
content of exported goods at 40 per cent — double the level from twenty years
ago — and with decreasing transport and communication costs, and with greater
fragmentation of production across the globe — our narrative on trade must
change.
Japan has
also been at the forefront of this new narrative. Global value chains and trade
in tasks has underpinned your automobile industry for decades. In fact, trade
in tasks has certainly enabled the emergence of “Factory Asia.” There is now
limited utility and questionable accuracy in declaring many things ‘made in
country X or in country Y’. For many products, value addition occurs in several
countries, not just one or two and these can only accurately be described as
“Made in the World.”
This
replacement of “trade in goods” with “trade in tasks” has concrete implications
for how we think about trade and offers important opportunities for research
and analysis by institutes such as RIETI. To provide you with an example,
traditional measurements would assign the total commercial value of an import
to a single country of origin. But when applied to the new ‘made in the world’
platform, this methodology can unduly exaggerate bilateral trade balances and
under-state where value addition occurs. This incongruence has two main
impacts: one, inflated bilateral trade numbers which can inflame anti-trade
sentiment and two, lead to policies which are not aligned with the pace,
direction and reality of world production and trade.
What can
policy makers and you as policy researchers do to address some of these
challenges?
Of
particular interest to countries at all levels of development and also to the
business community, is Trade Facilitation. The broad consensus is that trade
facilitation is a crucial element in helping countries to trade cheaper and
faster and to allow developing countries in particular, to become more
attractive destinations for investment and for accessing value chains. For
business, effective trade facilitation and behind the border procedures are
non-negotiable. A research focus on the
linkages between trade facilitation, FDI and global value chains in the
Asia-Pacific region would be a concrete deliverable from RIETI to the international
dialogue on this subject.
Japan, and
in fact many countries in the region, have created the blueprint for
effectively using value chains. The knowledge and expertise that you have
developed in this region needs to be shared with countries in Africa, Latin
America and the Caribbean and in the Pacific. Asia can be a leading knowledge
provider in this area and I urge institutes such as yours to broaden this form
of cross regional knowledge sharing.
Research
and policies must work together. One often informs the other. Sometimes
research comes after policies are already in place but as one of the issues
that I know is of particular interest to you is how to get businesses more
interested in trade policy, I suggest that your research must remain ahead of
the curve and should inform policy. Providing evidence-based research on value
chains, non-tariff measures, regulatory frameworks, and developing business
friendly analyses of the opportunities and challenges in global and regional
trade agreements are important to ensure research remains fresh and relevant.
At the
multilateral level we must ensure that protectionism is held in check. At the
global policy level, Governments need to continue to give due attention to the
Doha Development Agenda. Completing these negotiations would be an important
stimulus to spreading the spoils of Global Value Chains while ironing out some
of the distortions in global farm trade would set the stage for greater
investment in value chains in agriculture.
We have had incremental success with issues outside of the DDA such Aid
for Trade, the Government Procurement Agreement and the continued discussion on
the ITA2 — and I commend Japan for its role in these processes — but there are
many other issues related to market access, services, and rules which also
necessitate collective attention and energy.
I hope that
these brief words today would have provided you with some insight into the
current global environment that we are operating under, but also the
opportunities there for policy makers and researchers to contribute to
broadening and deepening the comprehension of this new colloquium of
international trade.
I look
forward to hearing your views.
Thank you.
Fuente: OMC