MANILA, 20 September 2007 — Global and regional finance officials renewed their pledge yesterday to help poorer economies in the Asia-Pacific region boost their capacity to reap benefits from trade and spur the growth needed to cut poverty.
At the opening of a two-day aid-for-trade conference attended by nearly two dozen finance and trade ministers, officials said it was critical to help less developed economies gain access to transport and communication networks as well as to funds to develop open market systems and key services. The initiative was begun at the 2005 World Trade Organization ministerial conference in Hong Kong, with major donors pledging $15 billion to the program.
Asian Development Bank President Haruhiko Kuroda said there was a need to help the region’s 22 least developed and small states — which account for just 0.3 percent of world exports — catch up with the rest of Asia and the Pacific. The region accounts for over 27 percent of world gross domestic product.
“Two faces of Asia and the Pacific remain,” he said, pointing to newly industrialized economies like China and India, which have tripled their share of world exports since 1980, and then to weaker economies that barely increased their share of exports over the last 25 years.
The weaker economies lag behind because some of them have been hobbled by conflict, others remain in transition to market economies, while others grapple with geographical isolation or limited markets, Kuroda said.
Aid for trade is not a substitute, but an important complement to better trade rules, Pascal Lamy, director general of the World Trade Organization, told the conference hosted jointly by the ADB and the WTO and attended by key donor countries and private sector representatives.
“It is about mobilizing resources that spur trade, investment and growth and allows us to close the development gaps,” Lamy said, adding that it will not only help poorer countries but also strengthen world trade itself.
He said that boosting trade should be made a national priority, and regional institutions like the ADB and donors need to help weaker economies execute their strategies.
Kuroda said aid should be focused on trade-related infrastructure, improving productive capacity, market-oriented reforms and trade development.
“If we as a region and an international community supply the resources needed to draw these economies into the international trading structure, we can help kick-start economic growth — as many economies in Asia and the Pacific know well,” Kuroda said.
Outside the ADB office, some 50 trade activists held up placards that said “No to aid for unfair trade” and “Stop the Doha Rounds.”
“With the world already burdened by odious and illegitimate debt mechanisms, bribes are being used to break the deadlock of the stalled WTO negotiations,” the Jubilee South network said in a joint statement issued by various groups.
“By dangling this rotten carrot...rich and powerful nations hope to slam open the closing doors to profits from their goods and services from the poor people of the world,” the Jubilee South network statement said.
