World Trade Organisation

This framework will provide an opportunity to the participants to avail trade finance facilities for trade transactions such as export invoice trade financing, reverse trade financing, bill discounting under Letter of Credit, Supply Chain Finance for Exporters, Export Credit (Packing Credit), Insurance/Credit Guarantee, Factoring and any other eligible product, on the ITFS platform.

Sourcing of these medical supplies has been the single biggest challenge for the governments across the world. One of the barriers to this has been the dependency on patent holders who only can decide who gets what. To address this, on October 2, 2020, India and South Africa made a proposal for Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) waiver of certain provisions of the TRIPS Agreements for the prevention, containment and treatment of Covid-19.

The global economic and trade measures index, introduced by the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, was on the rise in 2020, said the report released by the council's legal advisory committee on economic and trade frictions, the Xinhua news agency reported.

The global trade body said prospects for a quick recovery in world trade have improved as merchandise trade expanded more rapidly than expected in the second half of last year. "World merchandise trade volume is expected to increase by 8 per cent in 2021 after falling 5.3 per cent in 2020, a smaller decline than previously estimated," the WTO said in a press release, Xinhua reported.