The World Trade Organization (WTO) has a role to play in strengthening the global trading system for development, primarily by lowering barriers to trade in goods and services and ensuring that trade rules are useful to Developing countries. But greater international cooperation must complement WTO-based negotiations, in particular, concerted action outside the WTO to enhance the trade capacity of poor countries ("aid for trade").
The World Trade Organization (WTO) has a role to play in strengthening the global trading system for development, primarily by lowering barriers to trade in goods and services and ensuring that trade rules are useful to Developing countries. But greater international cooperation must complement WTO-based negotiations, in particular, concerted action outside the WTO to enhance the trade capacity of poor countries ("aid for trade").
The complex challenges highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic and other major health emergencies emphasize the need to rethink our approach to surveillance, while building upon the momentum of substantive investments in public health capacity in recent years. At the 75th World Health Assembly in May 2022, WHO set out a harmonizing framework to strengthen the global architecture for health emergency preparedness, response, and resilience (HEPR). Under the proposed global architecture, the ability to effectively prevent, prepare for, detect, respond to, and recover from health emergencies at subnational, national, regional and global levels depend on the operational readiness and capacities in five interconnected systems: collaborative surveillance, community protection, safe and scalable clinical care, access to countermeasures, and emergency coordination. This document defines the collaborative surveillance concept—proposing a conceptual model, dimensions across which collaboration should occur to enable multi-source and multisectoral surveillance, key objectives and concrete capabilities for how countries, with the support of WHO and partners, can further advance surveillance capabilities, and address fragmented and insufficient capacity. The collaborative surveillance concept was developed to support all stakeholders working on surveillance.
The World Trade Organization (WTO) has a role to play in strengthening the global trading system for development, primarily by lowering barriers to trade in goods and services and ensuring that trade rules are useful to developing countries. But greater international cooperation must complement WTO-based negotiations - in particular, concerted action outside the WTO to enhance the trade capacity of poor countries (quot;aid for tradequot;).Despite recurring rounds of trade liberalization under the auspices of the World Trade Organization (and its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT), complemented by unilateral reforms, many developing countries have not been able to integrate into the world economy. Hoekman argues that from the perspective of the poorest countries, a multipronged strategy is required to strengthen the global trading system. Moreover, much of the agenda must be addressed outside the WTO.The most important contribution the WTO can make to development is to improve market access conditions - for goods and services - and ensure that trade rules are useful to developing countries. Enhancing trade capacity requires concerted action outside the WTO (quot;aid for tradequot;) as well as unilateral actions by both industrial and developing countries to reduce antitrade biases.This paper - a product of Trade, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to investigate how the WTO can be used more effectively by developing countries to integrate into the world economy.
Vaccines are powerful weapons in the fight against pandemic viruses as shown by responses to both the 2009 H1N1 influenza and the COVID-19 pandemics. However, planning for accessing, allocating and deploying vaccines in a pandemic situation is a complex endeavour, beset with multiple challenges at all levels – local, regional and global. The World Health Organization (WHO) and its partners have prepared this revised guidance document to assist countries update their national deployment and vaccination plans (NDVPs) by leveraging global learnings from past pandemic responses, including the recent COVID-19 vaccination effort. The development and testing of a NDVP would not only advance pandemic preparedness efforts but would also have benefits in terms of increasing national capabilities to manage other health emergencies which require emergency vaccination campaigns.
Policymakers, academics, think tanks and practitioners will benefit from the international perspective of the book, particularly those interested in the influential Asian architecture. This book is also a useful reference tool for students of macroecon
Pandemic preparedness and response are quintessential “global public goods”: unless the new coronavirus is controlled everywhere, the risk of pandemic resurgence remains. This paper presents the key role of development finance in helping developing countries' health systems prepare and respond to outbreaks. Yet, the global architecture is proving insufficient - and the risk is great that developing countries will be deeply affected by the direct consequences of the outbreak.
The WHO Benchmarks for International Health Regulations (2005) (IHR) Capacities was first published in 2019 and serves as a capacity-building tool and reference document to guide development/updating of country health security plans, including the national action plan for health security (NAPHS). It is now updated to a second edition which incorporates lessons learned from recent health emergencies, as well as alignment with updated IHRMEF tools, the HEPR framework, the WHO Director-General’s ten proposals to build a safer world together, and to build back better through multi-hazard and whole-of-society approaches to support better preparedness for future emergencies. Over 250 relevant technical leads contributed to this edition, by providing inputs from WHO regional offices, countries, partners and participation in global consultation meetings. The second edition is titled “WHO Benchmarks for Strengthening Health Emergency Capacities: Support for the Implementation of International Health Regulations (IHR) and Health Emergency Prevention, Preparedness, Response and Resilience (HEPR) Capacities”. WHO benchmarks are further digitalized for easy and quick use, along with a reference library, which is currently being updated. The audience for this document includes WHO Member States, health ministries and other relevant ministries, healthstakeholders, partners, nongovernmental organizations and academia to support building capacities at the country level.
