News

Members of the World Trade Organization, supported by UNCTAD, commit to streamlining procedures that will significantly increase international trade, reduce corruption and boost development.

With a major global agreement on making international trade "faster, easier and cheaper" due to take effect in the early weeks of 2017, more than 300 officials from some 70 countries who are charged with making it work gathered for the first time at an UNCTAD-organized forum in Geneva on 23 January.

The entry into force of the Trade Facilitation Agreement is imminent. Only three more ratifications are needed. For developing countries that have ratified or will ratify the Agreement the entry into force results in important obligations.

With the imminent entry into force of the WTO's Trade Facilitation Agreement, UNCTAD launches the new multilingual version of the UN Online Repository for National Trade Facilitation bodies.

Seeking ways to boost its economy, the East African nation of Sudan aims to remove unnecessary costs and reduce the time to trade across its borders by 40%, boosting exports by at least 25% by the end of 2021, according to a new plan launched by the Sudan Working Group on Trade Facilitation in December 2016.

UNCTAD is set to support Central African countries cut the costs of their cross-border trade, after signing a three-year €380,000 ($420,000) deal with the European Union in Brussels on Friday.

​Discussing sustainable freight transport is both timely and topical as the world community moves ahead with the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (ASD) and the Paris Climate Change Agreement (COP21).

​A special event on “E-Certification: the Trade Facilitation Measure” was organized during the Fourteenth session of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, in Nairobi on 21 July 2016.

UNCTAD's work with West African countries gains momentum thanks to German support for a new capacity-building project for Nigeria, Mali and Benin.

A high-level panel on trade facilitation discussed opportunities and challenges for developing countries associated with the implementation of the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement.