Coronavirus: WTO urges members to share facts on trade measures
Director-General ofthe World Trade Organisation (WTO) Roberto Azevedo offers called for transparency in regards to to trade-related policies introduced to fight coronavirus as the WTO ramps up monitoring of the COVID-19 pandemic's trade implications.
In a note on Tuesday asking all of the members to submit information to the WTO Secretariat about new trade and trade-related steps, DG Azevedo called certain focus on the policies customers had introduced in response to the coronavirus outbreak.
"The current COVID-19 pandemic represents an almost unprecedented health crisis, and members will be understandably responding by introducing legislation and guidelines to get to combat this overall health emergency," he wrote.
"These include methods that are trade-related, such as for example export measures and monetary support programmes."
The DG asked members to supply the Secretariat with info on their COVID-19 policies with trade implications, emphasising that whatever they submit will be used purely for transparency purposes.
The request was part of a longstanding transparency exercise in which the WTO Secretariat compiles regular reports on trade-facilitating and restricting measures introduced by members of the Band of 20 top rated economies together with by the WTO membership all together.
Another trade monitoring report can look at measures taken between mid-October 2019 and mid-May 2020, according to WTO.
The monitoring workout has previously shone a spotlight on trade measures used the context of health emergencies, notably the H1N1 flu outbreak in 2009-10.
In comments on the COVID-19 outbreak, DG Azevedo has stressed the value of transparency in regards to to trade-related measures, arguing that it would be particularly valuable for the countless countries that count on imports for medical supplies.
Even more broadly, the DG has setup a taskforce of specialists from across the Secretariat to screen the effects of COVID-19 in trade flows and the overall global economy.
A number of the taskforce's findings will inform the WTO's twelve-monthly trade projections which will be released the following month.
