This isn’t always a net positive for societies. Untrammeled economic growth, if mismanaged or neglected by policy, often results in widening inequalities and environmental degradation that eventually cost the trading economies in negative externalities just as much as it gained from revenue.

As we launch today the 2023 edition of our Hinrich-IMD Sustainable Trade Index, we remind ourselves again that the advancement of trade is the advancement of sustainability goals. The index ranks 30 key economies including all the Asia-Pacific, the United States, China, Britain, and parts of Latin America, against a framework of 71 measures of economic, societal, and environmental policies. In effect, it acts as a blueprint for governments, businesses, and communities to shape strategies and policies that integrate their conduct of global trade in ways that promote the prosperity and sustainability of their economies.

As Visual Capitalist shows in this illustration, the first instalment in a series that will showcase the findings of the 2023 Sustainable Trade Index, New Zealand tops the chart in getting such policies right. The world’s two largest economies, America and China, sit somewhere in the mid-tier, while Myanmar and Russia are getting most of these policies wrong.

These findings come as the global trading system is experiencing an era of the most severe geopolitical and economic fragmentation in 70 years. Protectionist trade policies are being implemented under the guise of responding to the headwinds of post-pandemic inflation and geopolitical tensions. Globalization is transmogrifying in ways that no longer translate to common progress.

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