March 7, 2001 Posted to the web March 7, 2001
Washington
Brussels, Pascal Lamy, EU Commissioner for Trade, Gun- Britt Andersson, Swedish State Secretary for Development Cooperation, Migration and Asylum Policy, and Uri Dadush, Director, Economic Policy and Development Prospects Group, World Bank, today opened the first in a new Brussels-based seminar series focusing on poverty alleviation and sustainable development
This Series of Advanced International Policy Seminars is an initiative of the World Bank and The European Policy Centre to bring together policy experts from the European Institutions, the World Bank, developing countries, the EU Member States, NGOs, think-tanks and universities, to develop, integrate and share knowledge on global issues crucial to poverty alleviation and sustainable development such as international trade, good governance, the fight against communicable diseases and conflict prevention.
Today's "Trade and Poverty" seminar, organized with the support of the Swedish EU Presidency, covers three areas. David Dollar and Alan Winters from the World Bank presented policy research papers on Trade, Growth and Poverty and Trade Policies for Poverty Alleviation respectively in the morning sessions, and this is to be followed in the afternoon by a discussion on the International Policy Implications.
The seminar also heard from panel discussants including: H.E. Alejandro Jara Puga, Ambassador of Chile to the WTO; H.E. Abdul Hasan Chowdhury, State Minister for Foreign Affairs, Bangladesh; and H.E. Hassan Abouyoub, Ambassador of the Kingdom of Morocco to France.
"Some important messages emerged from the research presented at the seminar," said the World Bank's Uri Dadush. "Openness to trade was a powerful force underpinning the rapid growth of the one-third of developing countries that were 'rapid globalizers' in the 1990's, and rapid growth was strongly associated with poverty reduction." Furthermore, there is no evidence that openness to trade leads to systematic changes in income inequality. Some "rapid globalizers", such as China, saw increased income inequality, while others, such as Thailand, Malaysia, and Costa Rica, saw declining inequality, implying that the poor gained more than proportionally from increase openness and rapid growth.
At the same time, trade liberalization, especially when it is concentrated in specific sectors, inevitably creates some losers as well as winners, and it is important to identify its impact on the poorest segments of the population. Though there is no presumption that the poor are necessarily those adversely affected by trade liberalization, the fact that they are typically the least empowered segments of the population and the most vulnerable to shocks justifies special attention. Usually, the answer is not to avoid, or even delay trade reform, but rather to adopt compensatory policies that ease the adjustment and alleviate its impact on the poorest.
EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy explained, "The shared objective is to ensure that globilization helps deliver benefits for the poor. Trade Policy has to contribute to make a difference to the poorest people. In terms of globalisation, we need rules. In terms of a vehicle for rules, we need a Round".
A new website, http://www.EIPF.org, will also be launched to ensure that ideas and issues raised in seminars reach a wider international audience. The website will cover a number of themes related to poverty alleviation and international development, incorporating articles and papers submitted by the seminar participants as well as reports on individual seminars.
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