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PRESS RELEASE: PRESS/TPRB/219
1 October 2003

TRADE POLICY REVIEW: HONDURAS
Further reforms would help to improve growth

The WTO report, along with the policy statement by the Government of Honduras, will serve as a basis for the first Trade Policy Review (TPR) of Honduras by the Trade Policy Review Body of the WTO on 29 September and 1 October 2003.

The important measures taken by Honduras in recent years to liberalize trade and investment have produced only moderate results, and further reforms would help to raise the country’s modest rate of economic growth, according to a report on the trade policies and practices of Honduras released on 1 October by the WTO Secretariat.

New laws have been passed in key areas and significant structural changes have taken place. Free-trade zones have become important generators of employment and investment, and transformed manufactures into a key export. However, the zones’ long-term effectiveness may need reconsideration in the light of Honduras’s low growth and new factors which might come into play.

The report also points out that Honduras, with one of the lowest per capita GDPs in Latin America, depends heavily on remittances from Hondurans living abroad, and export diversification remains limited. While expanding its multilateral commitments would help Honduras lock-in its recent reforms, its growing participation in preferential agreements is straining its institutional capacity.

The following documents are available in MS Word format.

• Secretariat report
  > Contents and summary observations (10 pages, 72KB)
  > Economic environment (15 pages, 355KB)
  > Trade and investment regime (17 pages, 114KB)
  > Trade policies and practices by measure (42 pages, 262KB)
  > Trade policies by sector (44 pages, 714KB)
  > Appendix tables (17 pages, 242KB)
    
• Government report (38 pages, 536KB)
    
• Chairperson's concluding remarks
    
• Minutes of the meeting are available approximately 6 weeks after the meeting.  

Note  back to top

Trade Policy Reviews are an exercise, mandated in the WTO agreements, in which member countries’ trade and related policies are examined and evaluated at regular intervals. Significant developments that may have an impact on the global trading system are also monitored. For each review, two documents are prepared: a policy statement by the government of the member under review, and a detailed report written independently by the WTO Secretariat. These two documents are then discussed by the WTO’s full membership in the Trade Policy Review Body (TPRB). These documents and the proceedings of the TPRB’s meetings are published shortly afterwards.

Print copies of previous TPR publications are available for sale from the WTO Secretariat, Centre William Rappard, 154 rue de Lausanne, 1211 Genève 21 and through the on-line bookshop.

The TPR publications are also available from our co-publisher Bernan Press, 4611-F Assembly Drive, Lanham, MD 20706-4391, United States.

Schedule of forthcoming reviews  back to top

Bulgaria: 15, 17 October 2003
Guyana: 29, 31 October 2003
Haiti: 4, 6 November 2003