News

By UNCTAD Secretary-General Rebeca Grynspan

Developing countries could lose out on tax revenues due to capacity and legal constraints on the implementation of needed reforms, UNCTAD’s World Investment Report 2022 says.

Amina J. Mohammed, the United Nations deputy secretary-general, said access to modern, clean energy is the common denominator underpinning most Sustainable Development Goals.

Only 8% of the value created by international supply chains flows to 100-plus developing countries, analysis by UNCTAD suggests, placing the role of "global value chains" in developing countries' strategies among discussions to be held at UNCTAD’s upcoming Global Commodities Forum.

UNCTAD Secretary-General Mukhisa Kituyi has called for renewed efforts to boost intraregional trade in Africa, commenting that it could help in bringing peace to the continent, at a forum held to mark the 50th anniversary of the African Union.​

UNCTAD's Secretary-General and three experts from Africa said this afternoon that increasing the variety and sophistication of goods produced on the continent was the key to building a thriving regional trade system.

The Deputy Secretary-General of UNCTAD has discussed intensified cooperation for aid to Africa, with the heads of three Japanese development agencies. The meetings took place on the occasion of the fifth Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD V), which was held in Yokohama from 1 to 3 June. ​

The Palestinian economy in East Jerusalem has been progressively isolated and constricted and now wields less than half of the economic influence that it had in 1993, a new UNCTAD report says. A disabling economic environment, high and rising rates of poverty, faltering industry and services, restricted investment, housing shortages, and inferior social and municipal services all combine to create hardship for the city's Palestinian inhabitants and to stifle their economy's potential, the report contends.

Ambassador Mukhtar Tileuberdi (Kazakhstan), President of UNCTAD’s Trade and Development Board, has told a high-level meeting in New York that UNCTAD’s theme of development-centred globalization is central to ensuring progress in the coming years.​

Experts at the UNCTAD Trade and Development Board session today said African countries will have to make major structural changes to their economies -- and should look at it as an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of green economic growth.