TRADE AND THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS

AUTHOR – DR. DEMA MATROUK ALOUN, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF COMMERCIAL LAW, FACULTY OF LAW/ ISRA UNIVERSITY, EMAIL – DEMA.ALOUN@IU.EDU.JO

BEST CITATION – DR. DEMA MATROUK ALOUN, TRADE AND THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS, ILE INTERNATIONAL LAW REVIEW, 2 (1) OF 2024, PG. 65-79, APIS – 3920 – 0021 | ISSN – 2583-8172.

INTRODUCTION

Trade fosters sustainable development. The pursuit of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development represents an opportunity for sustainability scholars to put trade goals in the larger scheme of poverty relief, innovation for climate action, and global partnerships for sustainable development. Research has led to rich and multifaceted insights, revealing the various channels through which trade can contribute to or detract from specific SDG targets and even entire goals. Such findings underscore the fact that, irrespective of an individual’s sectoral or thematic focus, trade is a factor that will have a positive or negative effect across many economic sectors, including agriculture, finance, energy, and fisheries, and in thematic areas as diverse as labor and employment law, science and technology, and human rights. Each of these themes will be explored in separate sections. Our overarching aim is to encourage readers to engage with the role of trade within the SDGs and to pursue both the clarification of the part trade plays in the goals, as well as the identification of policy levers to pull in order to ensure that we accelerate the optimized contribution of trade to such mandated outcomes. Potential research questions might include overviews on evidence that trade is having positive and negative impacts on targets and SDGs or how the measures that leverage those positive drivers and limit the negatives have or have not been successful in the past, and why, or even which policy-based SDG targets are easier or harder to achieve with current trade trends and trade policy or other development funding policies that involve trade-related investments.