Ahead of this week’s Trade Ministers’ meeting at Davos with the Director-General of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), Roberto Azevêdo, Lord Green, Chairman of TheCityUK’s Advisory Council, has sent a letter to all participants calling for urgent action to be agreed to safeguard and expand open markets and global trade as a key catalyst for global economic growth.
At the multilateral level, TheCityUK calls for Ministers to commit to a work programme that will deliver the progress the WTO needs to make before its Nairobi Ministerial in December this year. Failure to do so, it says, risks serious undermining of the multilateral system.
TheCityUK also stresses other key trade and investment policy initiatives that must be pursued and completed without delay. Two of the most significant are the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), backed by nearly one-third of the WTO’s membership, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). As the biggest deal ever attempted, TTIP promises greater integration in the transatlantic marketplace with significant growth prospects in the world’s two largest economies. Estimates by the CEPR suggest TTIP could increase UK national income by up to £10 billion annually; the EU Commission estimates it could bring annual gains of up to €119 billion to the EU economy; and the Atlantic Council suggests it could create more the 740,000 jobs across the US.
According to TheCityUK, these, together with a range of other bilateral or plurilateral trade agreements currently being negotiated across the world, offer the potential to significantly boost global economic growth and must:
- Be trade-creating and wealth-creating;
- Cater for the development of complex supply chains in which trade in goods is intricately complemented by high value-added services;
- Tackle those forms of trade restrictions which otherwise threaten the expansion of global welfare and limit the potential benefits for jobs and growth. This includes restrictions that threaten all electronic aspects of modern trade in goods and services, such as international data transfer and forcing businesses to localise basic commercial activities such as data-processing.
TheCityUK urges all those attending the meeting at Davos to recognise the urgent need to take action. Now is the time to make the right choices for the global economy and to boost the enabling role of trade and investment.