The World Bank and World Trade Organization (WTO) have urged progress in trade negotiations for emerging markets like Nigeria.
They made this statement in the quarterly report titled “Trade in Services for Development,” which was jointly released on Monday during a virtual meeting that The Guardian was present for.
They said that the development will enable emerging nations to earn more from increased trade and investments in the service sector. They pointed out that trade, economic diversification, and greater integration offer important avenues for pursuing more expansive developmental goals.
Over the past two decades, the growth of services exports from developing nations has outpaced the world average.
But according to the paper, more work has to be done in order to completely understand how trade in services contributes to development.
Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Director-General of the WTO, and Ajay Banga, President of the World Bank, jointly launched the publication.
“The future of trade is services, digital and green and it must be inclusive. This new publication translates that conviction into a call for action. It documents how services trade has become a key ingredient in our members’ growth and development strategies, including by helping countries diversify and expand their export baskets, making them more resilient to external shocks,” Okonjo-Iweala stated.
“The single best way to drive a nail into the coffin of poverty is by giving people a job, and in today’s world and tomorrow’s economy, delivering jobs means a very sharp focus on services. We need to build the tracks for the services train to run on, to run smoothly, quickly and at scale,” Banga noted.
Despite being severely impacted by the pandemic, the world’s trade in services continues to be the most active. The expansion of digitally provided services has been far faster than that of trade in products.
According to the estimate, services will account for 50% of global commerce as well as more than two-thirds of the world’s GDP and 50% of the worldwide labor in 2021.
‘Trade in Services for Development’, looks at how developing economies can fully share in the benefits that services trade brings to their economies and step up their development prospects. The need to deepen international cooperation on services trade, including at the WTO, to reduce the costs of trade and to facilitate and expand developing economies’ trade and investment in services are among the key messages from the publication.”
“In the broader context of trade in services for development initiative, an aid-for-trade package could help strengthen the participation of developing and least-developed economies in services trade, the publication notes. Scaled-up resources are needed to boost the capacities of developing economies to diversify and expand exports, design and implement services trade reforms and supply competitive services to global markets,” the report concluded.
