Uzbekistan officials come to grips with WTO’s joint statement initiatives
The fast-evolving trade landscape has brought new challenges to the fore that are not covered by formal WTO agreements. Uzbekistan officials learned about the WTO’s joint statement initiatives on matters such as investment facilitation, services domestic regulation and e-commerce in the penultimate course of a training series to advance trade expertise in support of Uzbekistan’s WTO accession bid.
Some of the key trends in global trade have been the dawn of digital trade and the exponential growth of services trade. Foreign investment has also emerged as a key driver of trade in the context of rising global value chains.
These areas are technically highly complex and countries require guidance to keep pace and adequately respond to them.
The WTO’s consensus-based approach to trade negotiations, however, means that new disciplines – crucial to trade but where consensus for full-fledged multilateral agreements are lacking – risk slipping off the agenda.
To circumvent the challenge, so-called Joint Statement Initiatives (JSIs) by like-minded groups of WTO Members were initiated in 2017 to advance discussion on such emergent trade issues.
A full-day online course, dedicated to the WTO’s JSIs, was offered on 15 January to Uzbekistan’s trade negotiators and officials from other relevant ministries.
Helping developing countries keep pace
The course provided an in-depth analysis of the structure of the
Investment Facilitation for Development Agreement, which entered force in February 2024. Participants also came to grips with the evolving scope of the JSI on E-commerce and learned about the current state of play on Domestic Services Regulation disciplines.
The JSIs are particularly important for developing countries whose regulatory capacity tend to be more constrained. JSI agreements are plurilateral, which means they are not binding on all WTO Members, but work on an opt-in basis. Some of the key elements treated in the session included:
- The current state of play of Services Domestic Regulation disciplines;
- An in-depth analysis of the structure of the Investment Facilitation for Development Agreement; and
- The evolving substantive scope of the JSI on E-Commerce.
Twenty-five officials attended the course. Represented were the Ministries of Agriculture, Economy and Finance, Employment and Labour Relations, Investment, Industry and Trade, Justice as well as relevant state agencies. Twelve doctoral students, researchers and UWED professors also participated.
The course on JSIs was the penultimate offered as part of the Trade Policy Training Programme series, conceived by the ITC to advance public sector trade knowledge. The programme offered 11 courses over the past year in a collaboration between the ITC, the University of World Economic and Diplomacy (UWED) and the WTO Chairs Programme.
ITC’s flagship trade tools
The final course of the programme – taught on 25 and 26 February – introduced trade officials to flagship ITC market analysis tools.
The two-day workshop familiarized participants with the Trade Map for analysing trade statistics. They learned to negotiate the complex requirements of Rules of Origin by using the Market Access Map. They were taught how to identify export opportunities, utilizing the Export Potential Map, and, finally, participants were introduced to the Global Trade Helpdesk – a tool for market analysis.
Forty-eight participants from 15 ministries, state agencies, other public entities, as well as UWED trade law students benefited from this final course.
The Trade Policy Training Programme was funded by the European Union under its project Facilitating the process of Uzbekistan’s accession to the WTO
