Trade and development report (2017 - 2019)

 https://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/tdr2017_en.pdf

https://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/tdr2018_en.pdf

https://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/tdr2019_en.pdf

Trade and Development Report, 2016

The Trade and Development Report 2016: Structural Transformation for Inclusive and Sustained Growth, examines one of the big policy challenges at the centre of the 2030 development agenda: how to establish strong linkages and complementarities across the range of productive sectors needed to establish a virtuous circle of rising and shared prosperity.

The Report will address such issues as the "middle income trap", "premature deindustrialization" and the "natural resource curse" through an examination of trade specialization, investment financing and the effective use of industrial policies.

http://unctad.org/en/pages/PublicationWebflyer.aspx?publicationid=1610

The Trade and Development Report (TDR) 2015

The Trade and Development Report (TDR) 2015: Making the international financial architecture work for development reviews recent trends in the global economy and focuses on ways to reform the international financial architecture. It warns that with a tepid recovery in developed countries and headwinds in many developing and transition economies, the global crisis is not over, and the risk of a prolonged stagnation persists. The main constraint is insufficient global demand, combined with financial fragility and instability, and growing inequality.

These trends reveal the lack of a well-functioning international monetary and financial system, which should be able to properly regulate international liquidity, avoid large and lasting imbalances and allow for counter-cyclical policies; however, international liquidity and capital movements respond to economic conditions in developed countries rather than to actual needs in developing countries. Furthermore, much of the current regime is in fact driven by large international banks and financial intermediaries whose activities increased much more rapidly than the capacity of any public institution (either national or multilateral) to effectively regulate it. Recent initiatives aiming at better regulation remain too timid and narrow.

This dysfunctional regime can neither prevent boom-and-bust episodes nor recurrent debt crises; and when such crises occur, it leads to asymmetric adjustment that throws most of the burden on debtor countries and exacerbates a pro-cyclical bias. This calls for a mechanism for debt resolution, in particular for sovereign external debt, which minimizes the cost of crisis and shares it fairly among the different actors. Furthermore, inefficiencies and missing elements in the international financial architecture have had negative effects in the provision of long-term finance for development.

http://unctad.org/en/pages/PublicationWebflyer.aspx?publicationid=1358

Trade and Development Report (2014)

Fifty years ago this year, and twenty years after a new multilateral framework for governing the post-war global economy was agreed at Bretton Woods, a confident South gathered in Geneva to advance its demands for a more inclusive world economic order. The first United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) added a permanent institutional fixture to the multilateral landscape, with the responsibility “to formulate principles and policies on international trade and related problems of economic development”. Moreover, and moving beyond the principles that framed the Bretton Woods institutions (and later the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)), it was agreed that “Economic development and social progress should be the common concern of the whole international community, and should, by increasing economic prosperity and well-being, help strengthen peaceful relations and cooperation among nations”. UNCTAD’s 50th anniversary falls at a time when, once again, there are calls for changes in the way the global economy is ordered and managed. Few would doubt that, during the five intervening decades, new technologies have broken down traditional borders between nations and opened up new areas of economic opportunity, and that a less polarized political landscape has provided new possibilities for constructive international engagement. In addition, economic power has become more dispersed, mostly due to industrialization and rapid growth in East Asia, with corresponding changes in the workings of the international trading system. However the links between these technological, political and economic shifts and a more prosperous, peaceful and sustainable world are not automatic.

http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/tdr2014overview_en.pdf