Scale up investment in online trade "WTO boss to Ghana"

The Director-General of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has urged Ghana to scale up investment in the flourishing online trade in order to take advantage of the $ 4 trillion worth of global online trade. 

She said the country was doing well by providing some digital trade and professional services in business outsourcing, with many women involved in the trade, and urged that more efforts be put in to make major inroads in the sector.

 Dr Okonjo-Iweala stated this when she paid a courtesy call on President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo at the Jubilee House last Wednesday.

She said digital trade was “the wave of the future,” explaining that it was the fastest growing sub-sector, currently at eight per cent per annum compared to other types of trade.

She indicated that the WTO could help with issues such as certification, quality control of the products and breaking into new markets.

Fisheries

The WTO Director-General urged President Akufo-Addo to use his influence to get other African nations to ratify the new fisheries agreement.

She explained that the agreement would benefit developing countries especially those in Africa with fish resources.

 She said after 21 years of deadlock, the organisation was able to secure the fisheries subsidies agreement which would do away with $22 billion in harmful instances that led to illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, adding that they were negotiating a second phase of the agreement to deal with overfishing and overcapacity.

Dr Okonjo-Iweala stated that the continent was losing $2.3 billion from illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing and $3 billion from overfishing and overcapacity.
 

Trade finance

Touching on financing, President Akufo-Addo said it was important for the IMF and the World Bank to expand access to concessional financing for the country.

He said that was necessary because ultimately, if the country did not reform how the market responded to its needs, it would be difficult to have a sustainable debt profile, adding that the Bank of Ghana and others were making efforts to bring that to the centre of the discussion.

President Akufo-Addo indicated that Ghana, as a prelude to the fund programme, had undertaken some adjustments to its debt profile in order to be on a more sustainable trend.

He said there was the increasing desire for the Bretton Woods institutions to change the way they did business and see themselves as people at the forefront of mobilising capital and also provide some guarantee for securing private financing.