Le libre-échange au secours de la croissance

Like many places around the globe, Bangladesh has made great strides in liberalising trade over recent decades. 25 ago, the protection rate, which takes into account tariffs and other trade barriers, was 74 percent. Today, that rate is just 27 percent.

Over the next 15 years, the Sustainable Development Goals will influence more than USD 2.5 trillion of money in development aid and trillions more meant to help reduce poverty, hunger and disease, and improve education and the environment. Bangladesh, along with all other nations, now has to decide where to spend scarce resources to do the most good. And clearly not all of the many, many UN targets are equally good, smart or effective.

As the U.S. and China are locked in a major trade dispute, the White House is renegotiating existing free-trade agreements to turn them into "managed trade" agreements, and the mood has turned against freer trade around the world. 

Yet, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel both made calls for more free trade and multilateralism.