WTO Director-General: the world cannot afford decoupling

The world cannot afford decoupling and fragmentation, the Director General of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said at a meeting of the 14th Annual Meeting of the New Champions, also known as the Summer Davos Forum, in North China's Tianjin Municipality on Tuesday.

"The situation of slower growth in trade would be made far worse if the world were to decouple or fragment," she said.

If two trading blocks were decoupled, it will cost the world a 5 percent loss in the global GDP in the longer term, which is the equivalent of the whole economy of Japan, Okonjo-Iweala noted.

"So decoupling or fragmentation is something that the world simply cannot afford to have."