Speaking at the opening ceremony of the 15th Annual GTAP Conference held at WTO headquarters in Geneva on 27 June, UNCTAD deputy Secretary-General Petko Draganov called for sound and policy-oriented research to provide answers and effective policy responses to ever more complex problems of the world economy.
The GTAP (Global Trade Analysis Project) is a global network of researchers and policy makers conducting quantitative analysis of international policy issues within an economy-wide framework. GTAP is coordinated by the Center for Global Trade Analysis which is housed in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University, USA.
The centrepiece of GTAP is the GTAP Data Base, a fully documented and publicly available, analytical data base for the global economy which contains detailed country data. UNCTAD has been an active board member of the GTAP consortium for many years, and has made extensive use of GTAP tools in, inter alia, studies related to Africa's development and trade negotiations, as well as in the analysis of trade and employment, particularly for one of its flagship publications, the Trade and Development Report.
In his statement at the opening ceremony of the GTAP conference on "New Challenges for Global Trade and Sustainable Development", Mr. Draganov reaffirmed that UNCTAD shares the comprehensive nature of the GTAP approach since UNCTAD's broad mandate requires it to look into different aspects of the globalization process. He noted that the current economic turmoil has brought about a paradigm shift in development economics.
"There is a need to rethink trade and development policies so as to make them aligned to the ultimate objective to bring about sustainable development for all," he said. "Good policies require innovative ideas and sound analysis. We need such new thinking now more than ever."
He went on to say that research and analysis is essential for designing better policies. UNCTAD has received renewed mandates from its member States at the UNCTAD XIII conference in April this year to strengthen research and analysis, and will be doing so, Mr. Draganov stated.
