Panel discussion on global trade

A briefing and panel discussion on the Future of Global Trade and Investment climate and trends: Focus on Sri Lanka! will be held today at the Galle Face Hotel.

In the last decade people have clearly seen a boom in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), more rapidly than trade and domestic production. With time, in addition to the dominant markets US and UK in the western hemisphere, many other developed countries have invested significantly overseas and firms from developing countries have increasingly become more outward investor oriented.

Trade plays an important role as an engine of growth. It is further a mechanism to link markets internationally and one can clearly identify the exponential growth in trade; which has been facilitated by liberalising frameworks such as GATT and WTO. From a trade perspective, the progress in developing countries has been substantial and resulted in playing a pivotal role within the national GDP of all developing countries.

Asian economies, with their outward-looking development strategies, have reaped tremendous benefits in the form of trade expansion, economic growth and poverty reduction.

Globalization in one sense could be classified as a combination of four major trends. These are namely the development and advancement of international trade, financial flows (including foreign direct investment as the most important component), global communications and movements of people.

As a result of the rapid growth of FDI flows, Global foreign direct investment inflows rose in 2007 by 30 per cent to reach an all-time high of US$ 1,833 billion and the world stock of FDI worldwide reached US$ 15 trillion owned by 79,000 trans-national corporations through more than 790,000 foreign affiliates.