Resource detail

Title: Asia-Pacific Trade and Investment Report: Turning the tide: Towards inclusive trade and investment
Organization:United Nations
Year:2013

The Asia-Pacific region continues to outperform the rest of the world in the pace of overall growth. Trade-led expansion continues to feed the region’s economic dynamism. The strong recovery in exports since 2009 has helped the region overcome the slowdown caused by the global economic and financial crisis, but this strategy of export-reliance is coming under increasing scrutiny. This Report is devoted to an examination of the circumstances under which trade, investment, and trade facilitation can support inclusive growth: that is, growth which benefits all. We label the set of policies that bring this about as “inclusive trade and investment”. The message is that the region’s dominant exported growth model should not be abandoned but needs to be supplemented by a range of complementary measures and policies, not the least social protection and employment policies to make trade and investment more inclusive. While regional economies have largely succeeded in achieving sustained economic growth, additional policies are required to spread the benefits of that growth more fairly: to reduce poverty; limit rises in inequality; widen access to opportunities; and bring excluded groups in from the margins. It is not enough simply to hope that rising wealth will eventually work for the benefit of all. The era of “trade and invest now, distribute gains later” has thus come to its end; we need to think of a new model to turn the tide towards “inclusive trade and investment”.




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