Dec 19, 1984

EIGHT PERCENT VOLUME GROWTH IN 1984.

GENEVA, DECEMBER (IFDA/CHAKRAVARTHI RAGHAVAN) – World trade is expected to grow in 1984 by about eight percent in volume but is projected to slow down to a five to six percent increase in 1985.-

And while world trade grew in 1984, as the GATT Director-General Arthur Dunkel put it recently, trade policies did not improve.-

There has been no rollback of protectionism, despite the repeated commitments at highest levels by Industrial countries, and as the OECD Secretary-General Jean-Claude Paye put it at the UNCTAD symposium "Protectionism has dug its feet in".-

The promises of the 1982 GATT Ministerial declaration and its mandated work programme had not advanced by the end of 1984, excepting for some procedural agreements to continue the work in 1985.-

And while the leading Industrial countries, and specially the U.S.A., were trying to merge these issues into a new round of GATT negotiations and including "trade in services" and opening up Third World markets for services exports of the industrial north, the Third World countries stood firm in GATT over this.-

At a time when the global recession and its domestic impacts, has stymied Third World initiatives and united approaches on several fronts, the unity that the "informal group of developing countries in GATT" (which includes besides the G77 members of GATT, also Spain, Turkey and Israel) have shown throughout 1984, has been remarkable.-

Despite several bilateral and other pressures and threats, the group stood firm in its insistence that the Industrial countries must first implement their past commitments on standstill and rollback, and that if this were to happen the Third World would initiate proposals for specific negotiations in GATT, covering tariff and non-tariff barriers, but confined to trade in goods.-

Apart from a lack of any rollback measures, protectionist measures, particularly discriminatory measures against Third World exports, in fact proliferated in 1984.-

Protection is now pervasive and encompasses such sectors as agriculture, consumer electronics, automobiles and vehicles, textiles, clothing, copper and steel.-

GATT and other estimates suggest that as much as 30 percent of the manufactured exports of the Third World are now subject to restrictions of one king or another in Industrial country markets.-

The restrictions imposed by the U.S. in December 1983 on textile and clothing imports from the Third World, and further actions taken in the same sector this year, hit severely all Third World countries.-

Apart from trade restrictions, trade harassments in the shape of anti-dumping and counter-vailing duty investigations have also proliferated.-

And the new U.S. trade law, while extending for a further period imports from the Third World under the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP), has also provided the U.S. administration with a tool to exert bilateral pressures on the Third World countries.-

The former Venezuelan President, Carlos Andres Peres voiced the general Third World view when he described the new U.S. law, at the UNCTAD symposium, as a U.S. hegemonic effort to legislate for the world.-