UNCTAD15 Global Services Forum: Opening ceremony
22 September 2021
Services-led transformation for post-pandemic recovery
Dear co-organizers, policymakers, and academics
Distinguished panellists and participants,
Colleagues at UNCTAD,
Dear friends,
I am pleased to give you a warm welcome to the 5th Global Services Forum 2021 and this High-Level session on “Services-led transformation for post-pandemic recovery”, in this my second week as Secretary General of UNCTAD, a role that in these testing times I have assumed with outmost devotion, openness and commitment.
This Forum is one of the pre-events of UNCTAD15, a Conference that seeks to become one of the key stepping-stones of the global multilateral response to this terrible pandemic. Because let me be clear about this: UNCTAD has to be part of the international response because we are uniquely positioned to channel the voices, the hopes, and the specificities of developing countries around the world.
This Global Services Forum 2021 aims to build up the global debate on the role of services and services trade in facilitating the economic transformation necessary for an inclusive and sustainable recovery – so that we not only build back better but also build back differently and build back better together. For the moment we are building back apart.
As the Trade and Development Report we released last week states, we are in the midst of a large economic recovery, of around 5.3 per cent in world GDP. But this figure is the average of increasingly divergent recovery paths around the world, with rich countries growing at rates that are multiples of those of some developing regions. In a word: this is a recovery that is leaving many people behind.
I must take this opportunity to thank all the distinguished panellists and all the participants in this event, as well as the co-organizers of the Forum, without whom none of this would have been possible. So, thank you to ECLAC, UNIDO, Latin American Association of Services Exporters, Barbados Coalition of Service Industries, Caribbean Export Development Agency, Konrad Adenauer Regional Program ADELA, Latin American and Caribbean Network of Researchers and Policy Makers on Services, Sound Diplomacy and The University of the West Indies.
Dear friends,
We stand at a critical moment in the history of multilateralism. The COVID-19 pandemic has proved to be one of the largest challenges of our generation, producing immense setbacks in the hard-won progress in reducing poverty and inequality that we had witnessed in previous decades around the world. This health crisis is not over, and many developing regions are seriously facing the prospect of another ‘lost decade’, exactly at the time when efforts towards achieving the 2030 Agenda should be coming into full gear.
One of the greatest lessons this pandemic has given us is that there is inequality, there is fragility, and when shocks come, gaps widen, and those that were already suffering, suffer the most. This is why we must always fight against inequality and fragility, because in a world where shocks are increasingly common what we call progress today might turn out to be a mirage tomorrow. That’s why we say that shocks should not shock us any longer and that we have to introduce resilience as an integral part of our sustainable development efforts.
This is why services, service trade, and service-led structural change are so important. The COVID-19 pandemic reconfirmed that lack of economic diversification in a country can be the root cause of its vulnerability to shocks. When shocks affect key external income-earning sectors, such as tourism, jobs evaporate, trade plunges, and people suffer.
Small-island development states, or SIDS, are a case in point. According to the 2021 edition of UNCTAD’s Development and Globalization: Facts and Figures, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, SIDS suffered an estimated seventy per cent drop in travel receipts in 2020. Imagine the magnitude of the economic shock they suffered, against the fact that services exports contributed on average twenty-five per cent to SIDS’ GDP, and almost half of their exports consist of income from tourism.
To rise “from inequality and vulnerability to prosperity for all”, as is the theme of UNCTAD 15, we need economic diversification that is greener and more inclusive. And this has important implications for the theme that brings us together today.
Services sectors play a critical transformative role in achieving greener and more inclusive diversification. Many services, such as transport, energy, and finance, provide key linkages and inputs to many productive activities including those of the manufacturing and agriculture sectors. Major industrial firms internalise critical services such as R&D, marketing, and communication within their business operation, making them more productive, more resource-efficient, and more able to benefit from global value chains specially if we can link small and medium size businesses. Indeed, in a 2017 UNCTAD report on services and structural transformation, we highlighted that services accounted for two-thirds of total productivity growth in developing economies between 1991 and 2013.
But there is another reason we should focus on services as an essential source of transformation for post-pandemic recovery. The digital economy has a large footprint in the services sector, and this includes the possibility of remote learning and working, areas that proved their importance during last years lockdowns, and that will become increasingly important in the near-term, in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Future of Work.
Dear friends,
Let me close by sharing with you what we hope to achieve here.
At this Global Services Forum, in eight separate events over the next three days, we will hold a global debate on how to make use of this potential of the services sector to achieve economic transformation for a sustainable and inclusive recovery.
For example, we will be examining how ICT services and digitalization are transforming the economy, trade, and societies; or how services related to the green, blue, and orange economy can facilitate inclusive recovery via, among other things, tourism; and we will be answering important questions, such as how can trade promote service-led transformation and economic diversification in developing countries.
The task ahead is great. I wish you all the greatest success, and I look forward to your outputs and their contribution to UNCTAD 15. Much hinges on what we can achieve here. I ask you to be empowered by the recognition that each and every one of you are in a unique position to help, now that the world needs you more than ever.
Thank you.
