UNCTAD

Perspectives are varied, and it is not an open-and-shut case against US Prez Donald Trump as his political opponents would have us believe. The tariff calculations could be questionable and the unilateral announcement should be decried, but what’s amply clear is this: trade will never be the same again.

Uganda is the fifth largest importer of second-hand clothing in Africa, and the Owino Market in capital Kampala is key to the trade in the country. A recent report looked at Owino and its impact on business and livelihoods. Study author Jennifer Wang talks about the fine print in the report.

UNCTAD's Trade and Development Report 2022 has cautioned that advanced economies would need to change course in their monetary and fiscal policies to avoid inflicting a worse damage than the financial crisis of 2008 and the COVID-19 shock of 2020. The cascading crises resulting from the pandemic combined with debt distress, inflation, climate change and the war in Ukraine have already turned a global slowdown into a downturn.

Better Cotton has joined the Partners’ Conference of the Aird for Trade focused on building a more resilient cotton sector. Jointly organised by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the International Trade Centre (ITC), the event focused cotton’s contribution to mitigating climate change, reducing poverty, enhancing food security, and the creation of jobs, especially for women and youth.

The growth in value of global trade in Q1 2022, a rise of about $250 million relative to Q4 2021, has been fuelled by rising commodity prices as trade volumes have increased to a much lower extent, according to UNCTAD’s Global Trade Update.

Plans for a minimum tax on profits of multinationals will have major implications for investment policy, the UNCTAD’s World Investment Report 2022 has warned. Developing countries could lose out on tax revenues due to capacity and legal constraints on the implementation of needed reforms.

Renewed pandemic impacts and factors like the Russia-Ukraine war leading to high food and fuel prices and tighter financing clouding the FDI horizon, UNCTAD foresees that the growth momentum of 2021 cannot be sustained and that global FDI flows in 2022 are likely to move on a downward trajectory, at best remaining flat.

Worried that financial shockwaves following the Ukraine war and changes in macroeconomic policies made by countries in recent months could push some developing nations into a downward spiral of insolvency, recession and arrested development, UNCTAD has called for more concessional and less conditional multilateral financial support for them. A texfash.com report.