WTO Chairholder Prof.Wilma Viviers from North-West University and her colleagues write an opinion piece in the World Trade Report of 2019 titled "MSMES and services trade: A pathway to inclusive growth in developing economies?". Introduction: There…
Can the digital economy help to alleviate the problem of inequality and forge more inclusive growth or will it exacerbate divisions as time goes by, to the detriment of those countries (including South Africa, India and Brazil) that have among the…
African countries offer many investment opportunities and also urgently need global investment finance. Along the value chains of the agro-industrial sector there are many global challenges for African countries to attract foreign direct investment…
Regional trade could be a powerful engine of economic growth and sustainable job creation. However, South Africa’s exports to sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are typically smaller and more short-lived than its exports to its traditional markets. This is…
In the wake of the impasse in the Doha Development Round (DDR) of multilateral trade talks, a number of countries have been looking at alternative ways to advance their trade agendas – one of which involves the negotiation of plurilateral trade…
For many years, the European Union has been an important market for agricultural products from Africa. However, African agricultural exporters have often found the European market difficult to access because of a raft of NTMs that add to exporters’…
In recent years, African countries have been giving greater priority to building their industrial capacity, placing particular emphasis on manufacturing in order to reduce their dependency on commodity trade. However, most African countries face…
The economies of southern Africa all face significant development challenges, not helped by the fact that many of these countries are ill-prepared for the demands of the rapidly advancing digital era. Given its heterogeneous membership and therefore…
Mr Christophe Degain and Dr Victor Kümmritz, from the WTO’s Economic Research and Statistics Division in Geneva, Switzerland, visited the NWU from 30 May-1 June 2017 to conduct a workshop on how a Trade in Value Added (TiVA) approach to measuring…
Ms Lorainne Ferreira, a PhD student in TRADE, attended a highly informative course on trade policy analysis in Dakar, Senegal from 21‒25 November 2016. The course, which was hosted by the African Institute for Economic Development and Planning and…