COMCEC Trade Outlook 2017
1
INTRODUCTION
International trade is considered as an important driver of economic growth, job creation, and
prosperity. However, many countries fail to benefit from international trade due to their
undiversified economies and high trade costs. Moreover, world trade remained stagnant in the
aftermath of the global crisis. Furthermore, recent weakness in global trade is characterized by
rising trade barriers in particular non-tariff measures and maturation of global value chains.
These trends pose further challenges in terms of integration into the global trade. In such a
global trading environment, countries seeking to benefit from trade should pursue to create an
enabling trade environment by implementing necessary domestic policies and undertaking
reforms. Moreover, strengthening bilateral and regional integration efforts ultimately aimed to
integrate at multilateral level and harmonizing national standards with international standards
become feasible policy options.
In terms of OIC Countries, 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 OIC
members depend solely on oil as the source of export revenues, Least Developed OIC members
depend mainly on primary commodities exports. Furthermore high trade costs hinders OIC
countries from accessing the international markets. Thus diversifying exports and reducing
trade costs remain main challenges for many OIC Members. In order to be able to integrate into
global markets efficiently and overcome these challenges, the importance of policy coherence at
the national and regional level comes to the forefront.
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.
Among these programs and projects, the Trade Preferential System among the OIC Member
States (TPS-OIC), which is the flagship project of the COMCEC on trade liberalization, is close to
become operational.
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