G20 ministerial meeting lays out focus areas

Joint communiqué continues to remain elusive

- SHREYA NANDI

The two-day G20 Trade Ministerial concluded on Friday with consensus on issues like digitisation of trade documents, increased access to information for small businesses, and mapping global value chains (GVCs) to identify critical sectors and products. However, a joint communique remained elusive.

All G20 member nations “unanimously agreed” on the outcome document, except for a disagreement over “one paragraph” on “geopolitical issues” pertaining to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, as taken from the G20 Bali Leaders’ Declaration in November last year.

The G20 nations endorsed the voluntary and non-binding “G20 Generic Framework for Mapping GVCs”, based on building blocks such as collecting timely high-quality sector-level data and voluntarily provided firm-level data, as well as the use of models and indicators for key insights from such GVC data.