In the current phase of global economic development, influence is no longer defined
primarily by size, dominance or the ability to impose outcomes. Instead, it is increasingly shaped by the capacity to connect—to link markets, ideas and people across regions in ways that create durable economic value. In an era marked by interconnected challenges and widely distributed opportunity, the countries that matter most are those able to build sustainable, resilient and cross-continental networks. In the current climate of geopolitical tension and regional instability, this capacity to maintain connectivity becomes essential. It is a cornerstone of stability, economic growth and the well-being of people everywhere.
Connectivity, rather than control, is increasingly shaping how countries contribute to global stability and prosperity. This understanding defines the strategic identity of the United Arab Emirates. The UAE has consciously positioned itself as a trusted connector: a nation that facilitates trade, enables partnerships and supports innovation across continents and stages of development.
Situated at the crossroads of Asia, Africa, and Europe, the UAE has leveraged geography, infrastructure, and policy agility to facilitate flows of trade and investment, becoming a hub for global connectivity. More importantly, it has done so with an emphasis on partnership, working with countries at different stages of development to create shared sustainable economic value. It is an approach that reflects the conviction that prosperity in the twenty-first century will be shaped by cooperation and the ability to engage constructively and consistently over longer timeframes. The UAE has invested substantially in infrastructure resilience and logistical capability, ports, customs systems and digital platforms to ensure that this bridge between markets remains operational.
In my own professional journey, which has spanned engineering, energy, sustainability policy, and global trade, there has been a central lesson: economic growth, environmental responsibility and long-term relevance cannot be pursued in isolation. Energy systems shape industrial competitiveness; climate policies influence investment decisions and trade frameworks determine how innovation scales across borders. Understanding these interconnections is essential to navigating today’s economic transformations.
In recent years, the center of gravity of global growth and innovation has shifted. Emerging economies now account for an increasing share of global demand and production, with new trade corridors based on complementary strengths rather than hierarchical relationships forming between them. This diversification of economic influence does not signal fragmentation of globalization, but rather its evolution into a more distributed and resilient system.
The UAE’s trade strategy has been guided by these new realities. Our place on the global stage relies on openness, reliability and partnership. By investing in connectivity—physical, digital and regulatory—the UAE has sought to facilitate the flow of trade and investment between regions, while supporting long-term, sustainable economic growth. In an environment where global commerce encounters uncertainty, this commitment to partnership and diversified connectivity proves its strategic value.
Through our Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreements (CEPAs), the UAE has strengthened our role as a trusted connector in global trade. These agreements are designed not only to reduce barriers, but to facilitate market access, support investment and enable long-term economic cooperation across sectors. We believe that nations that can connect producers to markets and innovators to capital will play an important role in global stability. The UAE’s network of 35 CEPAs reflects our dedication to building these bridges, even as geopolitical challenges test global supply chains.
In parallel, sustainable development has become a central pillar within this approach. Resource constraints and public health challenges pose growing risks to economic stability, particularly in rapidly growing regions, underscoring the need for collaboration across borders and sectors. Regional instability has the same effect. Supply chain fragmentation, energy disruption and logistics bottlenecks underscore why diversification of sourcing and routing is no longer optional. It is essential for economic resilience. This is why we are supporting South-South economic corridors, food security initiatives and emerging frameworks for green trade. The future of globalization will be determined by the quality of partnerships countries are able to build.
A More Distributed Global Economy
For much of the post-war period, global economic activity was shaped by a relatively small number of long-established industrial economies. These markets set the rules of trade, directed capital flows, and anchored global value chains. While this framework supported decades of growth and integration, it was built in a world with fewer participants, slower technological dissemination, and more predictable risk patterns.
Today, growth and innovation are far more widely distributed. A broader range of economies now contribute to global demand, production and entrepreneurship—supported by demographic growth, urbanization, and technological adoption. Digital connectivity has further lowered barriers to participation in global commerce, allowing smaller and mid-sized economies to integrate more directly into international markets.
Recent global disruptions have reinforced the importance of supply-chain resilience. Climate-related events, public health crises and lingering conflicts have highlighted the vulnerability of overly concentrated systems. The current escalation in the region urgently validates this lesson. Partners with multiple sourcing options and flexible routing capabilities are demonstrating greater resilience and weathering disruption. As a result, diversification of supply chains and international relationships has become a strategic priority for both governments and business.
This has led to a greater emphasis on regional connectivity and trusted partnership across multiple markets. This should not be understood as a retreat from globalization but as its evolution into a more nuanced iteration of it. The emergence of new industrial hubs in Asia, Africa and the Middle East has expanded the global economic landscape, creating additional pathways for cooperation and shared value creation. In this environment, adaptability and openness matter as much as scale.
For countries navigating this transition, the challenge is not to compete for dominance but to position themselves as reliable participants in a diversified global system. This requires investing in connectivity and committing to working constructively with partners at varying stages of economic maturity. The UAE’s approach emphasizes open trade, predictable regulatory environments and partnerships as foundations for long-term economic engagement.
Reimagining Trade From Exchange to Economic Ecosystem
As the global economy becomes more interconnected and complex, trade policy has had to evolve accordingly. Traditional approaches, focused primarily on tariff reduction and market access for goods, remain important, but they are no longer sufficient on their own. Today, trade increasingly operates as an ecosystem, encompassing services, investment, digital flows, logistics, standards and regulatory cooperation.
For policymakers, this requires a more holistic and forward-looking approach. Modern trade policy must address the full set of conditions that allow businesses to operate across borders predictably. This includes customs procedures, digital trade infrastructure, intellectual property protections, and the alignment of technical standards. It also involves creating pathways for small and medium-sized enterprises to participate in global value chains, not only large multinational firms. Inclusive access to trade opportunities is essential for sustaining growth across regions.
The UAE’s foreign trade agenda has focused on reducing friction across the entire trading process by shortening clearance times, modernizing customs systems, supporting digitalization, and ensuring that regulatory environments are transparent and predictable. These measures are often less visible than headline tariff reductions, but they are critical to lowering the real cost of doing business and encouraging long-term investment.
Resilience is also key. Delivering diversified supply chains and trusted trading relationships requires fostering partnerships that support continuity, adaptability, and mutual reliability. Trade agreements must be designed to not only expand volumes but strengthen the institutional logistical links that allow economies to adapt in times of disruption. Trade frameworks built for operational resilience, with flexibility to accommodate disruption and designed for continuity rather than ideal conditions alone, prove far more durable when tested. Sustainable considerations are now part of this broader trade equation, increasingly shaping production decisions and consumer demand. As a result, trade frameworks must support the transition to more sustainable economic models while maintaining competitiveness. This includes facilitating trade in environmental goods and services, supporting sustainable logistics and infrastructure, and encouraging investment in clean technologies.
Building Partnerships Through CEPAs
The UAE recognizes that sustained growth increasingly depends on the quality of economic connections. The Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreements are designed to establish clear and reliable frameworks that support merchandise trade alongside investment, services trade, and regulatory cooperation. The UAE-India CEPA, concluded in 2022, provided an early example of how such agreements can connect large, dynamic markets through an integrated trade deal. Subsequent agreements, including those with Australia and Chile, reflect the same strategic intent; to deepen economic engagement through rules-based cooperation that supports long-term commercial activity across different sectors. To date, the UAE has concluded 35 agreements, reaffirming its position as a leading global trade and investment hub. These agreements help encourage trade expansion while also facilitating investment and private-sector collaboration.
The CEPA ecosystem supports the UAE’s role as a connector across regions. The country’s long-standing investments in ports, logistics, aviation, and digital infrastructure have positioned it as a gateway between Asia, Africa, and Europe. Trade agreements complement physical connectivity by aligning regulatory frameworks and reducing structural barriers between partner economies. This approach enables businesses to operate across multiple markets with greater efficiency and confidence. By expanding global trade partnerships and accelerating the development of non-oil foreign trade, CEPAs are strengthening the UAE’s export base and pushing our non-oil foreign trade to record levels. In 2025, the UAE’s non-oil trade exceeded $1 trillion, which is within reaching distance of our 2031 target.
A notable feature of the UAE’s trade engagement is its emphasis on expanding connectivity between fast-growing economies. Trade and investment flows between developing and emerging economies are increasing at pace, driven by expanding consumer markets, industrialization and technological adoption. By engaging with these markets through bilateral agreements and economic dialogue, the UAE aims to support mutually beneficial linkages that reflect shared growth ambitions rather than asymmetrical dependencies. This strategy is reinforced institutionally through the establishment of a dedicated Ministry of Foreign Trade, reflecting the importance placed on trade as a driver of economic diversification and international partnership. The focus is on maintaining an outward-looking trade policy that remains responsive to global change while supporting domestic growth objectives.
Africa provides a clear example of this engagement. The UAE is now the continent’s largest source of new foreign direct investment, with over $110 billion invested across the continent between 2019 and 2024. Through growing partnerships and collaborative efforts, the UAE aims to support sustainable development initiatives that will accelerate mutually beneficial economic growth in the region, transforming high-potential markets into sustainable engines of growth. This is a model for the whole world, as we live in a globalized investment landscape in which economic growth, social developments, and international stability are intertwined.
Sustainability as Economic Strategy
Sustainability is increasingly shaping the practical conditions under which trade and investment take place. Climate-related disruptions, resource constraints and changing regulatory expectations, not to mention consumer demand, are now material factors in economic decision-making. As a result, integrating sustainability into trade and growth strategies has become essential to competitiveness. From a trade perspective, sustainability influences both demand and supply. Consumer preferences, corporate procurement standards, and investor expectations are increasingly aligned with environmental performance and resource efficiency. At the same time, producers and exporters face growing exposure to climate-related risks, from disruptions in logistics and agriculture to rising insurance and financing costs. Trade frameworks that fail to account for these dynamics risk becoming less effective over time.
In the UAE, sustainability is treated as a long-term enabler of economic performance. Facilitating trade in environmental goods and services, supporting investment in clean technologies and strengthening the resilience of food and energy systems are viewed as key components of our forward-looking trade agenda. These efforts are closely linked to broader diversification objectives, ensuring that growth remains robust as global economic structures evolve. The UAE’s investments in renewable energy, smart logistics and resilient supply chain infrastructure reflect this commitment to building systems that can withstand disruption while advancing sustainability objectives.
Food security provides a good example of this intersection between sustainability and trade. Reliable access to food depends on efficient logistics, diversified sourcing, and stable trade relationships. By supporting open trade channels and investing in agri-tech, storage, and transport infrastructure, the UAE seeks to mitigate exposure to external shocks while contributing to more resilient regional and global food systems. Trade policy, in this context, becomes a tool for risk management as well as economic growth.
Similarly, the transition toward more efficient production and logistics is reshaping global value chains. Rather than viewing this transition as a constraint, the UAE has focused on aligning trade facilitation with emerging market requirements, supporting cleaner supply chains, encouraging innovation, and ensuring that regulatory frameworks remain predictable and investment friendly. This approach recognizes that sustainability-related standards are increasingly part of how market access is determined.
Sustainability cannot be pursued in isolation. It depends on cooperation across borders and sectors, and on trade frameworks that support innovation. By integrating sustainability considerations into trade and investment policy in a pragmatic and market-oriented way, the UAE aims to support economic systems that are not only competitive today, but resilient over the long term.
Working across energy, sustainability, and trade has reinforced a consistent lesson: durable economic progress is driven less by abstract policy ambitions than by practical solutions that can be implemented, scaled, and adapted across markets. This perspective shapes how we view the role of innovation within trade and development, particularly in a world where solutions increasingly emerge from a wide range of contexts.
The Zayed Sustainability Prize offers one illustration of how innovation, trade and development increasingly intersect. Established in 2008, the Prize engages innovators from emerging economies who are addressing practical challenges in areas such as energy access, water management, health systems and food security.
One example is S4S Technologies, a Prize winner in 2022, whose solar-powered processing solutions help small farmers in India reduce food waste by converting perishable crops into shelf-stable products with export potential. Innovations of this kind strengthen food systems, support market diversification and demonstrate how locally developed solutions can scale through trade and partnership. Designed for resource-constrained environments and adaptable across markets, such solutions align closely with the objectives of modern trade policy, enabling ideas and technologies to move efficiently across borders.
These forms of partnership matter because innovation increasingly flows in multiple directions, and sustainable development is shaped collaboratively across regions. By engaging with innovators and partners in this way, the UAE contributes to an environment in which ideas can scale, markets can connect and cooperation can translate into lasting economic resilience.
Partnership as the New Measure of Influence
Our trade and investment success in recent years has underlined the value of trust, continuity, and practical cooperation. Partnerships provide practical means of managing risk, adapting to change, and expanding opportunity across borders. Influence today is defined less by the ability to direct outcomes than by the capacity to convene, facilitate and support collective progress, an approach that is increasingly essential in a globally interdependent world. When global trade encounters headwinds, the strength of partnerships is revealed through continued collaboration and commitment.
Looking ahead, the UAE will continue expanding its CEPA network and catalyzing South-South partnerships across trade, investment and sustainability. By prioritizing partnership over positioning, we aim to serve as a reliable platform where cooperation scales into resilient prosperity—transforming global connectivity into shared progress for generations to come.
