The 24th Summit of Heads of State of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) concludes in Astana with the adoption of Astana declaration that has laid a solid foundation for building a fair representation of multipolar world with more equality, justice and balanced global governance.
With the presence and commitments of world’s influential leaders like Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian president Vladimir Putin and others, declaration highlighted the importance of SCO’s role in terms of member’s working jointly for staying straight on the path of socio-economic development, security and stability, global peace with the advocacy of mutual and meaningful consultations for achieving the shared beneficial results.
The message lies in the declaration shows a greater solidarity among the member states of SCO as they have collaborated on moving ahead together for building a shared future of mankind in terms of security, economy, energy, trade, digitalization, E-commerce, information security, finance, eco-tourism and others.
The very significant output of SCO summit 2024 is about the approval of Economic Development Strategy’s Action Plan until 2030 that is the future mechanism of economic collaboration between member states as the global environment has been becoming very fragile and volatile considering the voices of anti-globalization, trade protectionism and unilateralism by western clubs like G7.
Amid the rising troubled geoeconomics and geopolitical situation fueled up by American and western mentality, close cooperation between SCO member nations attaches much needed importance for ensuring economic stability and sustainable development.
For this purpose, China’s focus on new quality productive forces is offering unlimited modernized economic opportunities for all SCO nations in the pursuit of innovative and high-quality developments driven by scientific and technological advancements.
In this context, SCO should take the advantage of Chinese characteristics regarding new quality productive forces that will allow the member states to change the path of economic development from traditional economic growth models towards new economic growth engines.
SCO nations must also consider the China’s open approach for taking advantages from the highly advanced opportunities being generated in the arena of new quality productive forces.
This approach will also provide an alternate economic productivity development path to SCO member countries by rejecting western’s upward trade protectionism in all business sectors that will be helpful for the high-quality development in Eurasian region.
Since its inception, the SCO with the theme of Shanghai spirit and pragmatism has gained splendid achievements in three key areas that includes culture and people to people exchanges, security cooperation and especially economic integration.
China, Russia and other members of SCO are ancient civilizations with a great history of development and known as great emerging economies that are on a critical stage of their developments and revitalization and it is also being shared with other partner countries. Healthy, steady and booming SCO is in the interest of Eurasian region that is attracting the attention of international community following its agenda of economic development for all on equal basis without attaching any political strings and conditionalities based on noninterference in any one’s internal matters.
It is widely believed that the outcome of Astana summit has helped in building a new avenue of cooperation by setting the modern trends of development which will further lead towards the ultimate prosperity by expanding economic activities in Eurasian region.
The track record of SCO economic collaboration is also a testament that the trade with in the member countries of SCO has emerged as an essential ingredient of economic framework which also brought long lasting economic benefits for the half of world population living in its member countries.
As per the latest statistics, SCO member states account for half of the world’s population, a quarter of the global land arena and a quarter of the global economic output that clearly empowers the organization for the rebalancing of global economic governance that can tackle the economic challenges in Eurasian region and beyond by creating more opportunities for expanding economic relations.
It can be described as that the SCO has injected a positive growth trajectory in the region as the member states are projecting high growth rates starting from 4 to 8 percent in average. It calculates the contribution of SCO states in global GDP equals to 30 percent with the foreign trade of all these countries within the organization is touching to 8 trillion dollars that has an equivalency to a quarter of overall global trade.
These economic results are achieved on the basis of SCO regional economic cooperation that was based on various economic frameworks especially linked with the Memorandum on Basic Goals and Directions of Regional Economic Cooperation and Launching the Trade and Investment Facilitation Process that was signed back in 2001.
This basic agreement injected a new momentum of trade activities and volume of imports and exports in the SCO region that has been proved as a great support to boost the economic volume in member countries and the masses are cultivating the enormous benefits.
