WTO urges G20 to lift post-2008 trade barriers

GENEVA (Reuters) - The World Trade Organisation called on the G20 leading economies on Thursday to begin removing trade barriers thrown up since the 2008 global economic crisis to allow international trade to resume the strong growth it saw at the start of the century.

In its latest report on the problem, the 160-nation body said that of the 1,244 trade-restrictive measures G20 members had introduced over the past six years, 962 remained in force despite a pickup in the world economy.

In addition, the report said, G20 countries were still introducing new measures limiting trade - at the rate of 18 a month over the past year - pushing the total in force up by 12 per cent since November 2013.

Restrictive trade measures can include special tariffs and quotas on goods, but also administrative actions - dubbed behind-the-border measures in trade jargon - like domestic regulations or subsidies to national producers.

Export restrictions can also be used, but the WTO said far fewer of those had been employed by the G20 since 2008.

"Continuing uncertainties in the global economy underline the need for G20 economies to show restraint in the imposition of new measures and to effectively eliminate existing ones," the WTO report declared.

The G20 is made up of 19 individual countries - Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, United States - and the 28-member European Union (EU).

The group, due to hold a summit in Brisbane, Australia, on Nov. 15-16, accounts for 80 per cent of world trade and 85 per cent of global economic production.

Its leaders have regularly pledged to roll back new measures introduced to protect their own national economies since the 2008 crisis, and trade diplomats say they are likely to renew such assurances in Brisbane.

The WTO said the barriers introduced since 2008 and still in place covered some 4.1 per cent of the value of world goods imports and around 5.3 per cent of the value of the group's overall imports, a total of $757 billion.

(Reported by Robert Evans; Editing by Larry King)