2030 Sustainable Development Essay

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The 2030 Sustainable Development agenda recognizes international trade as a key, cross-cutting tool to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and especially, SDG 8: “Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all”. Although the total value of world trade has stagnated in the past couple of years, international trade enjoyed an unprecedented growth in the years between 1980 and 2015, which have been defined as the age of globalization. The age of globalization has been accompanied by high levels of economic growth and a dramatic decline in the poverty rate across the planet, whose level is today by far the lowest in history. According to World Bank data, the percentage …show more content…

Sustainable trade can facilitate the transition to a green economy by fostering the exchange of environmentally-friendly goods and technologies and increasing resource efficiency. This in turn would generate economic opportunities and employment, which would have the potential to reduce inequalities and the poverty rate even further. At the same time, the transition to a green economy would create additional trade opportunities by opening up new export markets for environmental goods and services, and through the trading of certified “green” products. But such transition will not happen in a vacuum. Just as the manufacturing workers who lost their jobs in developed countries could be helped using increased fiscal revenues to fund retraining programs that provide them with the skills that the new productive structure demand, firms – especially SMEs in developing countries – will need external support and capacity building to obtain the technology and know-how required to upgrade the production methods to meet sustainability standards. This includes technical assistance programs to increase the understanding and compliance of green certification standards. Additionally capacity building is needed so that governments can be better equipped to design policies that mitigate the adverse impact of trade, and that promote sustainable consumption and

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