Preferential Trade Agreements and Trade Liberalization Efforts in the OIC Member States
With Special Emphasis on the TPS-OIC
92
Conclusions
In summary, the following general observations are worth making:
• Malaysia, Indonesia, United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Saudi Arabia have the highest
values of foreign trade among OIC group. These five countries account for close to 60% of
total OIC exports and imports to / from the world.
• Countries have highly diversified export structures. Import structures of OIC countries are
typically more diversified than export structures.
• The export structures of many OIC countries are concentrated, with a large role of
mineral fuels (oil and gas) and some other commodities. In aggregate, mineral fuels
account for more than half of total OIC exports to the world. At the same time some OIC
• Around half of intra-OIC imports are mineral fuels (mainly oil and oil products). While
mineral fuels account for more than half of total OIC exports to the world, they play
much less pronounced role in intra-OIC exports with a share of around 20%.
• The highest share of intra-OIC trade can be observed for African and Middle East
countries neighbouring several other OIC countries. In some cases relatively large oil
imports are among the driving forces of the high share of intra-OIC imports.
• The countries with the lowest share of intra-OIC trade are often either located far from
other OIC markets, or are strongly economically integrated with non-OIC economies or
have non-diversified export structures supplying non-OIC markets.
• On average, OIC countries made substantial trade liberalisation effort in the last 15
years or so with the average MFN tariffs for the OIC members declining substantially
from close to 20% during 1990s to the range of 10-12%more recently.
• Current average MFN tariff levels span from below 5% in some countries to above
20% in other ones. This provides an upper limit of preference margins available to
RTA partners, although a multiplicity of RTAs implies that effectively applied tariffs - at
least in the case of some countries - are significantly below MFN averages.
• Over the last decade or so OIC countries have seen a similar degree of change in the
commodity composition of their exports as experienced by China. This was a more
substantial compositional change than observed in the EU and the US.
• Intra-OIC trade shares have been gradually rising for the last several years by 2010-2012
reaching around 17% on the side of imports and 10% on the side of exports.