Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the head of the World Trade Organisation, has encouraged member states to diversify their trade and welcomed all free trade and regional trade agreements.

Mr Okonjo-Iweala made the call at the first Biennial Summit for a Sustainable, Inclusive and Resilient Global Economy at the UN headquarters in New York.

The summit was hosted by the secretary-general on the sidelines of the 80th session of the UN General Assembly.

“This biennial summit is not just another meeting,” UN secretary general António Guterres said.

Attended by top politicians, international institutions, and officials representing the G7, G20, and the COP30 UN climate conference, the focus was on addressing challenges in development finance on the rocky road to achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.

“While U.S. tariff actions have had a major impact, creating an unstable and uncertain equilibrium in global trade, the core of the trading system remains stable,” the head of the World Trade Organisation,” Mr Okonjo-Iweala, said.

In what she described as the “remarkable resilience” of the trading system, she noted that digitally delivered services had grown by almost 10 per cent last year to nearly $5 trillion, and that South-South cooperation continues to expand.

Speaking at the summit, South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa, who will lead this year’s G20 meeting of industralised nations, stressed the need to close the $4 trillion financing gap required to meet the SDGs.

To achieve this, he outlined suggestions that included “faster” and “fairer” debt relief and restructuring, as well as affordable and accessible financing, and reform of global taxation rules to help curb illicit financial flows.

“We need confidence that commitments that are made will be honoured and that global rules will be shaped by all members and not just a few,” Mr Ramaphosa said.

“This biennial summit is not just another meeting,” UN Secretary General António Guterres said. “It is the first of its kind.”

“This is networked, inclusive multilateralism in practice,” commended Mr Guterres, who proposed the summit in 2021 before it was recognised in last year’s Pact for the Future Agreement as one of the key approaches to reforming international financial systems.

The event “was envisioned as a space to help bring coherence, ambition, inclusivity, and action”.

The secretary-general has a favourite personal theme of reforming post-war financial architecture.

“Public resources are scarce, extremely scarce, in relation to the needs,” he said, while in the private sector, “international and national financial institutions need to do more and more leveraging of private investment and private finance”.

Mr Guterres called out the current “bias against the interests of developing countries”, arguing that capital borrowing must be priced more reasonably in the future to facilitate sustainable growth.

“Get your house in the best possible order,” International Monetary Fund managing director Kristalina Georgieva said when discussing what countries could do to help support reforms.

Ms Georgieva warned that global public debt is set to reach about 100 per cent of GDP by the end of the decade, which can deprive “many countries the fiscal space they need to absorb future shocks and to attend to the pressing needs of their populations”.

She urged countries to prioritise putting debt on a “sustainable path, flat or downward” and to implement structural reforms to attract private investment.

“Where regulation is outdated, you don’t need it, take it out,” she said. “Where access to finance is constrained, make it easy, and think of property rights security, because then people have the confidence to invest”.

(NAN)