Latest content: Trade and economy

Regional integration through regional value chains (RVCs) can help sub-Saharan Africa to trigger structural transformation in its economies.

This paper analyses empirically whether Aid for Trade (AfT) programmes have assisted the process of structural transformation in African countries.

This paper considers in detail the various factors that drive competitiveness in services, a critical but often overlooked part of the global value chain, and the policy levers available to influence them.

The trade relationship between India and Pakistan is considered to be one of the most important determinants of the South Asian regional integration initiative.

Regional Integration in South Asia: Trends, Challenges and Prospects presents an objective assessment of trade and economic co-operation among South Asian nations and highlights policy issues to foster regional integration. The analyses presented in this volume go beyond the usual discussions on trade-in-goods to provide insightful perspectives on potential new areas of co-operation, emerging challenges, and country-specific views on regional and bilateral trade co-operation issues.

This paper provides the first specific evaluation of the participation of Commonwealth small states and LDCs in WTO dispute settlement.

This paper reflects on small and poor developing countries’ needs from a multilateral trading system.

While the term ‘green economy’ has been widely used at the international level, very little information exists about what the concept looks like in practice.

Aid for Trade (AfT) has been an integral part of official development assistance (ODA) since its inception at the World Trade Organization’s Hong Kong Ministerial in 2005.

Joseph Stiglitz and Andrew Charlton make ambitious and innovative proposals for revitalising and rebalancing the World Trade Organization in a new report for the Commonwealth Secretariat: The Right to Trade: Rethinking the Aid for Trade Agenda (this title is available as a free pdf ebook).

Aid for trade is a fixture in the development landscape, accounting for approximately 25 per cent of total ODA, and is being positioned as a building block in the future development agenda beyond the 2015 expiry of the Millennium Development Goals.

As International Investment Agreements (IIAs) continue to evolve and become increasingly complex, a key challenge for developing countries is how to maintain coherent investment obligations that are consistent across any overlapping treaty provisions.

This issue of Commonwealth Trade Hot Topics argues that SVEs have three interrelated reasons for an ambitious outcome at the Rio+20 conference and the most important but often overlooked reasons relate to trade.

This Economic Paper assesses new innovative measures in trade in service negotiations that reflect the vulnerabilities and challenges faced by developing countries.

This Economic Paper assesses the potential trade effects of rules on procurement policies in Commonwealth ACP countries.

Even though individual nations in South Asia are among the world’s fastest growing economies it is, as a region, the least integrated.

AfT came under renewed focus under World Trade Organization (WTO)-sponsored Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations, as many developing countries realised that their lack of supply-side capacity prevented them from sharing in the expansion of global trade that has occurred in recent years.

China and India’s demand for oil and other raw materials to fuel their recent economic development has led to significant trading partnerships with Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

The international community met in Istanbul, Turkey, on 9–13 May 2011 to forge a ten-year programme of action for the 48 least developed countries (LDCs).

This resource book highlights strategies for community management and financing.