Kazakhstan's shared with its five year WTO Membership experience at the WTO Accessions Week

On 29 June 2020, the Permanent Representative of the Republic of Kazakhstan to the UN Office and other International Organizations in Geneva, Ambassador Zhanar Aitzhanova delivered her statement in the high-level session on the Present and Future Value of WTO Membership, conducted in the virtual format. The session opened the WTO Accessions Week, which is being launched on the week of 29 June  to 3 July.

Deputy Director-General of the WTO Alan Wolff, Deputy Director-General of Business Europe Luise Santos and Professor at the University of Geneva Monica Mrazova were among the key speakers at the event.  The Director of WTO Division on Economic Research and Statistics Robert Koopman moderated the session.

The WTO Deputy Director-General A.Wolff in his opening remarks highlighted the WTO's value for international trade and world economy, the Organization's key achievements in 25 years of its activity and outlined the necessary actions to be taken to ensure the future of the WTO. He also informed the acceding countries about the benefits of the WTO membership, the current challenges that the WTO faces, and the initiatives and measures of the WTO Members aimed at responding the challenges of the pandemic COVID-19.

Ambassador Aitzhanova highlighted the key benefits for Kazakhstan's economy from its WTO membership, which have been mainly resulted from the implementation of its commitments on gradual liberalization of markets access conditions for trade in goods and services. This November Kazakhstan will mark its 5th anniversary of WTO membership. The accession to WTO was one of the main strategic priorities of Kazakhstan in its foreign economic and trade policy.

The Kazakh diplomat noted that during the accession process to the WTO, the Government of Kazakhstan has implemented important economic reforms in order to create favorable conditions for attraction of investments to key sectors of the economy, increase transparency and ensure predictability of its trade policy, as well as to remove regulatory barriers to business. The systemic efforts of the Government have resulted in the increase of Kazakhstan's ranking to 25th place in World Bank’s Doing Business Report this year, compared to 2015, when Kazakhstan has  the 77th ranking out of 189 countries.

Liberalization of market access conditions in key economic sectors have resulted in increase of foreign direct investments to services sectors by 30% and amounted to 24 billion US dollars in 2019, and which is overall contributed to the diversification of the economy of Kazakhstan.