The heads of the International Monetary Fund (IMF); Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD); World Bank; and World Trade Organization (WTO), yesterday, launched a Joint Subsidy Platform (JSP) at www.subsidydata.org to enhance transparency on the use of subsidies.
The JSP is intended to facilitate access to information on the nature, size, and economic impact of subsidies, with a view to facilitating dialogue on their appropriate use and design.
Following the launch of the Platform in Washington, the agency leaders — Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (WTO), Mathias Cormann (OECD), David Malpass (World Bank), and Kristalina Georgieva (IMF), issued a joint statement.
The statement reads in part: “Since we launched the joint report on Subsidies, Trade, and International Cooperation in April 2022, the magnitude of costly subsidies has grown and so have tensions around their use.
“At the same time, a succession of international emergencies and the growing urgency of the climate crisis underscore that in some circumstances well-designed subsidies can have a legitimate, albeit often only temporary, role.”
In particular, they charged “Governments that decide to use subsidies to address market failures need to ensure that these measures are transparent, respect trade commitments, and do not undermine policy predictability.
“They should not use subsidies to provide a competitive advantage to domestic industry and should seek to minimize the cost and distorting effects on trading partners.
“Doing this effectively, however, will require building a more common understanding across governments on the appropriate uses and design of subsidies.”
They opined that “The Joint Subsidy Platform can help governments to develop such an understanding,” adding that “The first step is to improve transparency, and that is the initial contribution of the Platform. This will be a sustained effort.”
The organisations also promised to “continue to develop and extend the Platform, to deepen our own analysis, and to identify critical shortcomings in data availability and to support high-quality analysis by others.”
“By leveraging and encouraging development and disclosure of more data and analysis, our hope is to promote stronger dialogue on subsidies among governments, based on a more comprehensive set of subsidies data, leading to better policies and de-escalating trade tensions,” they added.
The JSP is intended to facilitate access to information on the nature, size, and economic impact of subsidies, with a view to facilitating dialogue on their appropriate use and design.
