COMCEC Trade Outlook 2016
1
INTRODUCTION
International trade is widely accepted as an engine of economic growth, job creation, income
generation, and ultimately poverty reduction. While the links are complex and are not
automatic, greater trade integration, especially when complimented with good policies and
institutions, is strongly associated with sustained economic growth in many parts of the world.
However, many developing and least developed countries have had challenges for integrating to
the global trade and thus its benefits for such countries have been limited. Additionally, weak
recovery pace of the global economic activity since the crisis of 2008-2009 and commodity
prices striving to reach to pre-crisis level pose threats to countries that rely on a few goods for
exporting, particularly primary goods. In this respect, the current global trading environment
necessitates export diversification if countries want to fully benefit from international trade.
Furthermore, today’s competitive markets require delivery of goods in a timely and cost-
efficient manner. This underscores the importance of trade facilitation efforts that many
countries around the world attach priority in their trade policies. Apart from national-level
efforts, trade facilitation has also gained prominence at the international level. The introduction
of WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement in 2013 and its ratification by 92 members of the WTO
signifies the importance of this topic on global scale.
In terms of the OIC Member States, they vary substantially in terms of geography, size,
population and economic development. Although remarkable expansion has been observed in
the volume of trade between the OIC and the rest of the world, as well as in the intra-OIC trade,
differences in trade performance across member countries remained stubbornly significant.
While some OICmembers depend solely on oil as the source of export revenues, Least Developed
OIC members depend mainly on primary commodities exports. Creating an enabling
environment for trade that will help enhance export capacity, increase the share of higher value
added products and ultimately diversify exports is a persisting challenge for many OICMembers.
The Standing Committee for Economic and Commercial Cooperation of the Organization of the
Islamic Cooperation (COMCEC) is the responsible platform within the OIC for enhancing
economic and commercial cooperation among the Member States. Since the commencement of
its activities in 1984, COMCEC has initiated numerous programs and projects towards increasing
intra-OIC trade (trade among the Member States), addressing the problems faced in trade
liberalization, trade facilitation, trade promotion and trade financing in the Member States.
In order to address the development challenges of the Member Countries more efficiently, the
COMCEC Strategy was adopted by the Fourth Extra-Ordinary Islamic Summit Conference held
on 14-15 August 2012 in Makkah Al-Mukarramah. Trade is one of the cooperation areas in the
Strategy, with the strategic objective of increasing trade among the Member States. İdentifying
trade liberalization, trade facilitation, trade promotion and trade financing as the output areas,
COMCEC aims at achieving strategy’s targets through its implementation instruments namely
Trade Working Group and COMCEC Project Funding.
The present document aims at providing a general outlook of the trade of OIC Member States
and identifying common challenges they face in increasing their trade. Despite their economic
and social differences, these countries also face some similar obstacles such as protectionist
trade regimes, dependency on commodity exports, burdensome procedures increasing the cost