The Arab Investment and Export Credit Guarantee Corporation (Dhaman) revealed growth in the volume of Arab trade in goods and services over the past few years.
Such commerce has surpassed the two trillion dollars threshold since 2011, reaching 4.7 percent of world trade, according to United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) data.
Dhaman said in its 2019 Q1 bulletin that growth of Arab trade is mostly due to high oil export revenues despite a number of weaknesses that still hinder Arab trade in general and inter-Arab trade in particular.
Dhaman made a set of proposals to address the elements hindering the growth of Arab trade in a press release, a copy of which was obtained by Asharq Al-Awsat.
The proposals include investing in transportation-related infrastructure and all trade-related logistics, reducing the procedures, time and cost of transnational trade, using technology intensively at all stages of trade, and among others adopting efficient, fast and less expensive systems to complete transactions.
The bulletin also reviewed in a specialized report the assessment of development of Arab performance in foreign trade, at the commodity and service levels, and analyzed its commodity structure and geographical trends.
The region’s share of total world trade also grew slightly between 2005 and 2017 from 4.2 to about 4.9 percent, while trade in developing countries has witnessed greater growth during the same period from 33.9 to 43.1 percent.
“Arab trade continues to suffer from the continued concentration of exports on primary commodities, the most important of which is fuel, while imports are concentrated on manufactured goods,” the report said.
It mentioned a number of obstacles contributing to the relative decline in Arab trade, mainly the increase in tariffs, especially in non-oil countries, many non-tariff restrictions that raise trade costs and the cost of inter-Arab trade that is also very high compared to European inter-trade.
