THE International Chamber of Commerce has put forward a set of business recommendations to help leaders of the world's major economies prepare for discussions on the world’s most pressing economic policy challenges at next month's G20 Summit taking place Hangzhou, China.


From climate change and energy to taxation and trade, the recommendations cover seven areas not covered by the 20 principle 2016 policy recommendations developed by the Business -20 (B20), and to which ICC significantly contributed and fully endorses.

"The supplemental ICC recommendations aim to complement B20 work and help drive progress on some of the most intractable economic and social challenges confronting the global economy," said Jeffrey Hardy, Director of ICC's CEO G20 Advisory Group.

"As the world business organization, we want to flag some salient areas where G20 leaders can make progress towards sustained and inclusive economic growth."
Here, we bring you a summary of the full recommendations which have been presented to the senior government officials - known as sherpas - tasked with laying the groundwork for the Summit.

Taxation

• Achieve coordinated and consistent implementation of the G20/OECD BEPS Action Plan, ensuring that all countries - not just OECD states - work together towards a consistent international tax landscape.

• Continue efforts to align investment and tax policies to facilitate greater consistency internationally and incentivize cross-border trade, investment, jobs and economic growth.

• Ensure effective dispute resolution mechanisms are in place to mitigate double taxation cases and associated tax disputes.

• Maintain the confidentiality of commercially-sensitive business information in CbC tax reports and ensure that all countries and jurisdictions implement the global standards, including new tax transparency measures related to the automatic exchange of financial account information between national tax offices.

Trade finance

• Ensure equitable, risk-aligned and consistent regulatory treatment of trade finance to enable the engagement of developing and frontier economies.

• Advance and multiply the positive impact of trade financing and trade, by actively enabling the deployment of FinTech solutions and propositions in international commerce.
Trade

• Call on WTO members to continue to refrain from taxing electronic commerce, and create conditions for the further development of the global digital economy.

• Initiate sectoral negotiations at WTO that can make a significant contribution to economic growth by reducing the cost of trading.

• Make concrete progress on the liberalization of trade in services through alternative negotiating approaches, including plurilateral approaches such as the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), with the ultimate aim of transferring results into the WTO. It is estimated that removing barriers to global exports of tradable services could generate world trade gains of US$1.0 trillion and global employment gains of almost 9 million jobs.

• Encourage more countries to join the recently announced plurilateral initiative to eliminate tariffs on environmental goods, expand product coverage using the widest possible definition of green goods and eliminate unilaterally-imposed environmental rules that are trade-restrictive or create barriers to trade. A meaningful WTO agreement in liberalizing trade on environmental goods, even on a plurilateral basis, could deliver US$10.3 billion of additional exports and augment employment gains by 256,000 jobs.

Investment

• Include dispute resolution mechanisms in all investment agreements to ensure investors have direct access to effective and independent dispute settlement.

• Avoid sectoral discriminations in the negotiation of investment treaties, which have a direct impact on the inflow of FDI.

• Devote greater attention to state-owned enterprises (SOEs), which can enjoy a range of preferential benefits and compete with the private sector in investment and trade areas.

• Refrain from abusing "national security" provisions in agreements and treaties for protectionist purposes. Such procedures should be applied in a transparent, fair and non-discriminatory manner if they are to be exceptionally used.

• Avoid forced localization provisions which have negative repercussions on both the investor and on the host country's attractiveness as an investment