Seminar on accession of Turkmenistan to the World Trade Organization
On November 27-30, 2023 a training seminar on Turkmenistan’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) was held at the “Yyldyz” Hotel in Ashgabat. The event was organized by the USAID’s Central Asia Trade Program with the support of the Ministry of Finance and Economy of Turkmenistan.
The training seminar was attended by more than 50 specialists from about 25 ministries and departments of the country, as well as lecturers of the economic and diplomatic disciplines from leading universities of Turkmenistan. The four-day training seminar covered topics such as introduction to the WTO and its main rules, trade liberalization, trade protection instruments, as well as discussion sessions on calculation of the total dumping margin, export price calculation and subsidy calculation.
The training seminar was led by Marius Bordalba, an international trade expert of the USAID’s Central Asia Trade Program, who has spent most of his career working with governments and specialists in Central Asia and the Caucasus. He mentioned that the accession of the countries of these large regions to the WTO is a very important step for the further development of national economies.
As is known, Turkmenistan, which had an observer status to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) between 1992 and 1994, has now started to build a new and closer relationship with the multilateral trading system, with the unanimous support by all WTO Members. The country began studying the issue of joining the WTO in 2013, for this purpose, a government commission was created to study agreements and WTO norms. In 2020, Turkmenistan was granted observer status in the WTO and the status of acceding country (active observer) to the WTO in February 2022. This became one of the key moments for the country for further interaction with the Organization
Currently, the WTO has 164 member states, which account for about 98% of world trade. About 25 more countries are negotiating membership, including some post-Soviet countries such as Belarus, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.
Rahym AKMURADOV,
Lecturer of the Institute of International Relations
of The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Turkmenistan