Taken from Google News

Geneva, Oct 27 (Reuters) - World Trade Organisation (WTO) economists predicted on Thursday that global goods trade growth would pick up to seven percent year on year in 2006 against an expected 6.5 percent for 2005.

In the WTO's latest report on international trade statistics, they said the slowdown this year after a boom in 2004, when growth reached 9 percent, was partly due to declining consumer and business confidence in richer economies.

If widespread predictions that the world economy -- hit earlier in the year by soaring oil prices -- recovered moderately by the end of December "world trade growth should accelerate to around 7 per cent in 2006," the report said.

This year's figure, based on trends up to the end of June, continued the see-saw since the turn of the century following several years of strong and steady growth during the 1990s.

In the second quarter of 2005, the report said, goods trade picked up in the richer economies, "but available information points to significant growth deceleration in intra-Asian trade and in U.S. imports" over the first six months.

"The steep rise in real oil prices, to their highest level in more than two decades, has negatively affected consumer and business confidence in the oil importing countries," the WTO economists who compile the report declared.

"The full impact of the price rises is still to be felt in consumer and business expenditure."

In a comment on the report, which confirmed preliminary figures for 2004 issued by the WTO in April, the 148-member body's new Director-General Pascal Lamy said the trend towards deceleration "is cause for some concern".

"To set us on the right course, we need to create more opportunities for trade, particularly in developing countries, and we need to adjust global trade rules to better meet the needs of entrepreneurs in the 21st century," he declared.