Friday, November 6, 2015

World-Wide Economic Decline in Trade

The top 20 most developed nations have slowed slowdowns in economic growth recently. This is mainly from high tariffs and trade barriers. Roberto Azevedo, a director-general from the World Trade Organization stated, “The number of trade-restrictive measures that have been introduced remains a cause for concern.” Free trade is a concept far from reality as trade restrictions have continued to tighten throughout the globe.  It is essential that all developed nations come together to discuss these affairs. In 2015 some of the most powerful nations will all come together in Turkey at a summit called the G20.  The G20 includes countries that control much of the world trade such as the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, Russia, China, and Brazil. The summit aims its focus on how to eliminate trade barriers throughout the world.


World trade is shrinking as volumes of imports fell -1.6% in the first quarter of 2015. This was largely due to the slowdown in growth and output of China and other emerging markets. The volume of world trade increased in 2010 by 13% but forecasted growth rates show a slowdown in growth to as little as 2.8%. The main reason behind this lag in growth of world trade is due to a Eurozone that continues to show weak output and growth. Tension between Russia and Ukraine and what some will call the “Greece Crisis” strike as other important playing factors when it comes overall decline in world trade. China, being one of the largest economies in the world, had a slowdown in industrial output. It seems that multiple underlying problems are resulting in the overall decline in world-wide trade. Until there is a common ground between developed and emerging nations world trade will continue to shrink.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

One must believe that the slowdown in China's growth had to play a significant role in the reduction of trade throughout the world. As many of the trade restrictions are not necessarily new. Any change or slowdown in China's output would have an effect on the whole world. Hopefully the world can continue to move toward a free trade environment.

Unknown said...

There are a lot of factors at play here especially with the part of China in their relationship to this. With an aging population more and more workers are no longer working which decreases the output that China is able to produce. With this being said, China has taken a step to try and spur population growth by allowing families to have two children instead of just one. While this will more than likely take a while for China to see the full effect of this, I think it is at least a step in the right direction given that it is planned out well by the government.

China has also begun to crack down more so on corruption in the business they conduct. By doing so, this will increase investment into China as well as encourage innovation and new technology in China. With this being said, I think China is readily aware of their current state and are making changes in response to try and combat this decrease in growth, output, and overall production.