The WTO “less optimistic” for world trade this year

2024-01-18 17:06:30

The World Trade Organization (WTO) is “less optimistic” for world trade this year, its secretary general said on Wednesday in Davos, noting in particular “the worsening of geopolitical tensions, the disruptions we see at sea Red, in the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal.”

At the beginning of October, just before the Hamas attack on Israel, the WTO had already revised its forecasts for 2023 sharply, saying it expected the volume of world trade in goods to increase by only 0.8%. But she expected, on the other hand, a rebound of 3.3% this year.

“We expect a weaker performance. We will review these estimates for this year,” Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala told reporters at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. The new forecasts “won’t be ready for about a month,” she continued.

In addition to geopolitics, she mentioned global growth, which seems set to be weaker than expected, weaknesses “in particular in Europe”, and “the return of inflationary pressures”.

“It will also have an impact on what central banks do with interest rates. For the first time, central bankers are very interested in what is happening in trade, so I talk to them a little,” she noted.

The situation in the Red Sea is “extremely disruptive”, because “it is one of the most important arteries of world trade”, also judged in Davos Vincent Clerc, general director of the Maersk group, which is one of the weights heavyweights of global maritime transport.

“For us, this increases transit time and will disrupt supply chains for at least a few months,” he said.

The boss of the German giant DHL, Tobias Meyer, for his part stressed that with demand “generally rather weak” and more transport capacity, the situation is “very different than two or three years ago”.

A reference to the blocking of the giant container ship Ever Given in the Suez Canal which had significantly disrupted maritime transport in March 2021, at a time when global supply chains were already very disrupted due to the coronavirus pandemic. COVID-19.