The World Trade Report 2012, released by the WTO on 18th in Geneva, indicates that emerging economies including China took up almost half of the world trade volume, with China’s export ranking the top and import ranking the second globally.
Being the most authoritative report on global trade released by the WTO, The World Trade Report 2012mainly summarizes last year’s global trade and anticipate that of next year. The report reveals, the increase in international trade has greatly overweighed that of global production, with the rise of developing economies being extremely impressive. More remarkably, China’s export volume in 2011 took up 11% of the world, a ten-time increase to 1980’s 1%.
Patrick Low, Director of Economic Research and Statistics at the WTO, mentioned at the releasing ceremony: “It’s clear that emerging economies are becoming more and more important. A simple summary: developing economies took up 1/3 in global trade in 1980, but nearly half in 2011.”
The report shows that the top four countries of export are China, the U.S., Germany and Japan, while those of import are the U.S., China, Germany and Japan. Among them, China’s export totaled over USD 2,000 billion in 2012. On the other hand, China’s import outweighs export in terms of commercial services, while the U.S. ranks the first in this regard.
Another highlight in this report is the anticipation on 2030’s global economy and trade. Patrick introduced: “To make it more reliable, we cooperated with another organization and conducted a simulation. It’s indeed a bold behavior for us to reveal this anticipation. We set two criteria to divide the target countries into developed and developing countries in this analysis, namely trade volume and GDP. We came up with a crucial conclusion, which is that the developing countries depend more on favorable environment, otherwise it will be difficult for them.”
According to the anticipation, by 2030, the share in global GDP and trade will increase for developing countries but will drop for developed countries. The share in global GDP will drop from 71% to 61% for developing countries while an increase from 29% to 39% is expected for developing countries. In global trade, the share for developed countries will fall from 53% to 43%, but will rise from 41% to 57% for developing countries.
The report also points out that the factors that will shape the future world trade include population, investment, technology, energy and other natural resources, transportation cost and social structure, etc.. Patrick stated: “We have pointed out in our report a series of possible influencing factors including the change of population, which has already affected the commodity supply and demand patterns throughout the world. Besides, there are also issues such as energy crisis, investment and infrastructure that will directly influence the way of future trade pattern.”
At the ceremony, Pascal Lamy, General Director of the WTO and Patrick Low both emphasized the construction of multilateral trading system, the prevention of trade protectionism and the promotion of world trade.
