Day: October 31, 2022

The Lao PDR is seeking to strengthen its regional and global integration – by building and strengthening economic relations with countries in the region and at the multilateral level. As a WTO Member State since 2013, the Lao PDR has undertaken commitments on a number of multilateral trade agreements.
At the regional level, the Lao PDR is a part of the ASEAN since 1997. Accordingly, it is a party to various regional trade agreements seeking to enhance and smoothen trade flow across the region, including the ASEAN+1 FTAs and the recently concluded Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (RCEP).
The Lao PDR is currently engaging in negotiations at the multilateral and regional levels – to formulate/strengthen trade rules in the context of the constantly evolving priorities and necessities in the world today.
With most contemporary trade agreements addressing a wide range of issues including services, investment, procurement, competition, e-commerce, and non-tariff issues, as well as environmental and social elements – it is important that the Lao PDR is well-equipped to engage effectively in these global and regional efforts to modernize trade rules and better integrate into global and regional value chains.
For instance, the ASEAN March 2022 launched negotiations to upgrade the ASEAN Trade in Goods Agreement (ATIGA) with the objective of making the Agreement more relevant, modern, forward-looking and responsive to regional and global developments and strengthening businesses’ capacity to benefit from regional integration.
The Lao PDR is taking part in these negotiations and will need to be prepared to engage with other Member States on various issues, including elements such as rules of origin, sustainable trade, facilitating the transition to the technological age, and strengthening MSMEs integration into value chains, among others.
Building upon the technical assistance provided by the International Trade Centre (ITC) to Lao’s trade negotiators and policy makers through the development of the Lao Foreign Trade Negotiations Roadmap (2021 – 2025), ITC is collaborating with the Department of Foreign Trade Policy (DFTP) of the Lao PDR to design and facilitate further targeted support for Lao’s policy makers to actively engage in these trade negotiations and capacitate stakeholders to effectively represent national interests and leverage further opportunities for businesses to integrate into global and regional value chains.
On that note, ITC and DFTP organised a training programme on New Trends in Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) in Vientiane Capital from 24 – 28 October. The programme demonstrated the evolution of FTAs over time. It explored the contexts of new and emerging issues being integrated into trade agreements, such as digitalisation, green and sustainable trade, labour and gender issues, among others, and its relevance for the Lao PDR. Participants actively engaged in group discussions on the relevance of new issues such as labour considerations, digitalization and procurement for the Lao PDR, and challenges faced in implementing trade agreements.
“Topics discussed in this training are highly relevant to trade facilitation, investment and development of digital economy in the Lao PDR – ultimately, regional economic integration. It is important to ensure that the Lao PDR has the right to access overall benefits. Most importantly, to guarantee that the future policy development is in line with the direction of trending topics related to free trade zone”. Says Seng-aloun Vilaysack, Deputy Director General, DFTP.
This training programme was conducted under the ASEAN Regional Integration Support Plus – Lao PDR (ARISE Plus Lao PDR project), funded by the EU. ITC, a joint agency of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the United Nations (UN), supports the Government of the Lao PDR in implementing the ARISE Plus Lao PDR project. The project seeks to strengthen Lao’s regional integration; increase benefits from trade opportunities and market linkages, including with the EU; and improve participation in the global value chains, focusing on coffee and processed wood products.
For more information, https://www.intracen.org/arise-plus-laos/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ariseplus/
About Arise Plus the Lao PDR: The ASEAN Regional Integration Support – Lao PDR Trade Related Assistance project (ARISE Plus Lao PDR) is funded by the European Union (EU). It aims to contribute to inclusive economic growth, increased climate change resilience, mitigation of vulnerability and job creation in the Lao PDR.
About ITC – The International Trade Centre is the joint agency of the World Trade Organization and the United Nations. ITC assists small and medium-sized enterprises in developing and transition economies to become more competitive in global markets, thereby contributing to sustainable economic development within the frameworks of the Aid-for-Trade agenda and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

Source: Lao News Agency

Authoritarian regimes are significantly overstating their GDP (gross domestic product) growth, according to new research that uses satellite images of countries at night as a proxy for economic activity.
The report estimates that autocracies exaggerate yearly GDP growth by about 35% relative to democracies.
Rosier picture
The research starts from a central premise: that all leaders, whether in democracies or dictatorships, want to boast of a booming economy.
“Everyone would always want to paint a rosier picture,” report author Luis Martinez of the University of Chicago told VOA. “The crucial difference is that in a democracy you have a whole network of checks and balances that restrains this behavior somewhat.
“For instance, you have the media scrutinizing the numbers. You have the opposition in the legislature also asking questions. Nowadays, in many settings we have freedom of information requests. The underlying hypothesis is that when we start looking at undemocratic regimes, these checks and balances start to become largely absent,” Martinez told VOA.
Night lights
So how to measure economic growth when you can’t trust the government numbers? Research indicates that satellite images showing the intensity of electric lights at night are a close proxy for economic activity.
A common example is the nighttime satellite view of the Korean peninsula. Much of South Korea, a democracy, is lit up brightly. North Korea – whose economy under dictator Kim Jong-un is around 60 times smaller than that of its southern neighbor – is mostly black, the frontier clearly visible by the change in luminosity.
“As an economy develops, things get built, like infrastructure, streetlights, homes, industries,” Martinez said.
Martinez used the “Freedom in the World” index produced by the non-governmental organization Freedom House as a measure of a nation’s democracy. He then compared official GDP figures to the economic growth implied by the satellite images of nighttime luminosity.
“What I find is that, say, you take two countries and in these two countries the nighttime lights grow by the same amount. And it happens that one of them is more democratic than the other. It turns out that that same amount of growth in lights translates into lower reported GDP growth in the more democratic country,” Martinez said.
Economic exaggeration
His study observed GDP figures and satellite data for 184 countries over 20 years, up to 2013.
The research looked at whether the type of economic activity taking place, such as agriculture or hydrocarbon extraction, would impact the intensity of nighttime lights. Martinez also investigated whether poorer data collection and reporting in autocracies could skew the results.
Even controlling for such factors, Martinez said the pattern was clear: Dictatorships overstate their GDP growth.
“When we compare the more stable, credible democracies to the more authoritarian regimes, we’re talking about something in the range of 30% to 35%. What that means for instance, is that if the true growth rate is 1%, the authoritarian regime will report the growth rate of 1.3%,” Martinez told VOA.
Foreign aid
Martinez said foreign aid programs also appear to influence a country’s willingness to overstate its GDP, according to his satellite analysis.
“Many of the poorest countries in the world receive a lot of foreign aid. But once they reach a certain level of income – once they become rich enough – they graduate out of that program, they become ineligible.
“And so of course you can imagine that when you have a lot of money coming in because the country’s relatively poor, you don’t have a strong incentive to overstate growth, and to say that you’re doing really well. So indeed I find that it’s only once poor countries graduate and become ineligible for foreign aid, that these (patterns) start to appear,” Martinez told VOA.
China
China’s authoritarian leader Xi Jinping was sworn in for another five-year term last week. Martinez’s model suggests Beijing may have overstated GDP growth by a third over the past two decades, making its economy far smaller than claimed.
A report published by the Brookings Institution in 2019 suggested that China had been overstating its economic growth by about 2% every year, making its economy 12% smaller than official figures then claimed.
China denies manipulating economic data.
Beijing delayed the release of its 2022 third quarter growth figures without explanation, coinciding with the Communist Party congress. The figures were eventually released in late October, claiming year-on-year quarterly growth of 3.9%, exceeding analysts’ forecasts.

Source: Voice of America

A tiny mountain-dwelling wren was the surprise winner Monday of New Zealand’s controversial bird of the year competition, which even had Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in a flap.
The piwauwau rock wren punched above its 20-gram weight, flying under the radar to win the annual contest ahead of popular fellow native contenders, the little penguin and the kea.
Fans of the wren set up a Facebook page to help the outsider soar up the final rankings when the fortnight-long poll closed Monday.
“It’s not the size, it’s the underbird you vote for that counts,” wrote one supporter.
The annual competition ruffled voters’ feathers in years past after a native bat was allowed to enter, then won, the 2021 title.
There was also outcry this year after the flightless kakapo — a twice previous winner dubbed the world’s fattest parrot — was barred from running to give others a chance.
The annual avian beauty contest run by environmental group Forest and Bird is popular with New Zealanders, including the country’s top politicians.
The leader of the opposition, Christopher Luxon, took to Twitter — where else? — over the weekend to endorse the wrybill, a river bird with a distinctive bent beak.
On Monday, New Zealand’s prime minister was momentarily ruffled live on air when asked if she had voted for her favorite bird.
“No I haven’t yet — you can’t just chuck a controversial question at me without a warning!,” Ardern said with a smile.
New Zealand’s leader revealed she will “always and forever” be loyal to the black petrel, which only breeds on the North Island but can fly as far as Ecuador, and she hopes the 2023 competition “will be its year”.

Source: Voice of America