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Delivered by Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana

30 June 2021

Distinguished participants,

Ladies and gentlemen,

Welcome to the launch of the Regional Integration and Value Chain Analyzer (RIVA).

The Asia-Pacific region has been the “factory of the world” for more than two decades.

In the past decades, Global Value Chain (GVC) has been a catalyst to boost economic growth and reduce extreme poverty in the region.

However, Global Value Chain patterns need to be more fully understood and analyzed to ensure inclusive, resilient and sustainable development.

For example, more than 70 per cent of Global Value Chain participation is still concentrated in a handful of economies, mostly in East and South-East Asia.

Those economies less engaged in Global Value Chains miss economic growth opportunities, but they were also less affected by the global supply shocks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic during the first half of 2020.

During this pandemic, Global Value Chains enabled quick ramp up of production of medical supplies, scaled-up production and distribution of hundreds of millions of masks, personal protective equipment and medicine that few countries alone could ever hope to produce domestically.

Looking forward, governments need to better understand the impact of Global Value Chain on climate change and their role in making environmental goods and services accessible and their associated policies.

ESCAP is leveraging its existing partnership with the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to develop RIVA.

This new online tool is being developed to assist policymakers and analysts access, use and correctly interpret available data on value added trade in goods and services flows.

RIVA’s Value Chain Analyzer automates time-consuming data analysis tasks that were previously performed by experts with specialized trade and data management skills.

Through RIVA, policy analysts from more than 72 economies can now easily generate insightful graphs and statistics on their contribution to, or dependence on, imports or exports of partners across 38 sectors. 

This first version of RIVA is expected to significantly enhance the evidence-based policymaking capacity of all our member States, while preparing governments to boost trade as a key means of implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

In closing, I would like express my sincere appreciation to all the partners who have made RIVA possible, especially the Forum for East Asia and Latin America Cooperation (FEALAC), the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), and the ADB.

I congratulate all of you for this productive partnership and collaborative approach.

I wish you a very successful launch event.

Thank you very much.

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