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 17/10/2009
[Finance]
Asian Recovery to Lead Any Global Trade Growth, WTO Chief Says
Asian countries that manufacture low-priced goods are likely to lead any recovery in global cross-border commerce as the recession wanes, World Trade Organization Director General Pascal Lamy said.
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By Sarah McGregor
(Bloomberg) -- Asian countries that manufacture low-priced goods are likely to lead any recovery in global cross-border commerce as the recession wanes, World Trade Organization Director General Pascal Lamy said.
It’s too early to predict whether a pick-up in worldwide trade since August will be sustained or be merely a spurt prompted by replenishing of depleted inventories, Lamy said today in an interview. Growth is likely to be earliest in economies that diversified beyond commodity exports to make items targeting cost-conscious households, he said.
“Consumers have been looking for low-priced goods because they have been making less money,” Lamy said in the Tanzanian commercial capital of Dar es Salaam, where he was attending a meeting of the WTO’s Least Developed Nations Working Group. “This will increase, at the end of this crisis, the part of Asia in world trade, because they have had less of a recession and they have improved their competitiveness.”
The volume of world trade in goods is expected to contract by more than 10 percent this year because of the recession, Lamy said. By comparison, merchandise exports worldwide grew 6 percent in 2007 and 2 percent in 2008. An estimate for 2010 should be ready by the end of this year, Lamy said.
“Although trade has been picking up since August, the drop in the last part of last year and first part of the year was very, very steep,” Lamy said. “The question is whether the bottoming out we’re seeing is a technical recovery because of restocking or whether it is a more sustainable picking up, and it’s too soon to say.”
Lamy told conference delegates yesterday that national leaders risk missing a deadline of completing the so-called Doha development round of worldwide trade negotiations in 2010 unless there’s “serious acceleration” in resolving disputes. A ministerial-level conference is scheduled for Geneva in late November to evaluate progress in the eight-year-old talks. |
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