Geneva: Trade restrictions against the backdrop of unilateral policies showed a sharp rise between mid-October 2023 and mid-October 2024, compared to the last Trade Monitoring Report in November 2023, the World Trade Organization (WTO) according to the Director-General’s annual overview of global trade developments.
The report, presented today at a meeting of the Trade Policy Review Body (TPRB), pointed to increasing evidence of inward-looking trade policies which could generate further uncertainty for the world economy. It, however, noted that the WTO members also introduced several trade-facilitating measures.
WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala welcomed a parallel increase in trade-facilitating measures, including tariff reductions, simplified import procedures, and the removal of quantitative restrictions, which covered an estimated USD 1,440.4 billion worth of traded goods during the review period – also up almost half a trillion dollars from the USD 977.2 billion covered by trade-facilitating measures between October 2022 and October 2023. She also underscored the positive trend in services trade, where the report indicates that the majority of the 134 services-related measures introduced over the past year were trade-facilitating.
Nevertheless, she warned that trade-restricting measures were adding up. She highlighted that the value of trade covered by the 169 new trade-restrictive measures introduced by WTO members during the 12 months leading up to mid-October 2024 was estimated at USD 887.7 billion – half a trillion dollars more than the value of trade covered by restrictions introduced in the preceding year, which stood at USD 337.1 billion.
“There is little meaningful rollback of existing trade restrictions. That means the stockpile of trade restrictions continues to grow,” she said. As of mid-October 2024, the stockpile of import restrictions in force was affecting an estimated USD 2,942 billion representing 11.8% of world imports. The comparable figure from a year earlier was USD 2,480 billion, or 9.9% of world imports.
Okonjo-Iweala cautioned that “export restrictions are also gaining momentum.” Over the review period, export-restricting measures covered USD 276.7 billion in traded goods, representing 1.1% of the value of world merchandise exports – well above the USD 159.1 billion (or 0.7% or world exports) covered by such measures introduced in the previous reporting period.
Overall, the accumulated stockpile of export restrictions since 2009 is estimated to affect 3.2% of world exports (worth about USD 786 billion).
“An important silver lining here is that our tracking of export restrictions on food, feed and fertilizers put in place since late February 2022 shows that these have decreased significantly, today covering an estimated trade value of USD 11.8 billion, down from USD 29.6 billion a year ago,” said DG Okonjo-Iweala.
Regarding trade remedy initiations, WTO members implemented an average of 28.2 per month during the review period, up from 16.7 in the previous period. This marks the end of the slowdown observed since 2021 in the number of initiations of trade remedy investigations. The monthly average of trade remedy terminations recorded for this period was 9.3, the lowest average recorded since 2015. Trade remedy actions, especially anti-dumping measures, continued to be a central trade policy tool for WTO members, accounting for 49.5% of trade measures on goods.
While Okonjo-Iweala emphasized that trade has shown resilience to the shocks of recent years, she warned that “the global trading environment appears increasingly fragile, uncertain and precarious.”
The report also indicates that during the review period, several economies announced and implemented trade and trade-related measures citing national security considerations. Preliminary research by the WTO Secretariat suggested that the overall estimated trade coverage of these measures remained limited at around USD 79.6 billion or 0.2% of world trade.
– global bihari bureau
