Commonwealth Business Council
organization
The Commonwealth Business Council (CBC) was an institution of the Commonwealth Family that aimed to use the global network of the Commonwealth of Nations more effectively for the promotion of global trade and investment for shared prosperity. It was formed at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting 1997 (CHOGM) in Edinburgh, United Kingdom, and replaced in July 2014 by the Commonwealth Enterprise and Investment Council (CWEIC).
Activities
The CBC acted as a bridge for cooperation between business and government, concentrating efforts on these specific areas:
Enhancing Trade
Mobilising Investment
Promoting Corporate Citizenship
Facilitating ICT for Development
Public Private Partnerships
Commonwealth countries are major stakeholders in the process and success of the Doha Development Agenda. Together the Commonwealth's 53 member countries account for 30 per cent of the world's population and about 25 per cent of its international trade and investment. Commonwealth countries account for 40 per cent of WTO membership. CBC's trade development objectives include encouraging
trade facilitation and further liberalisation of services; encouraging developing countries to play an active role in the World Trade Organization, and in new trade rounds, by maximising their negotiating strength through cooperative action.
The CBC helps to mobilise investment into Commonwealth countries through measures including ensuring access to international capital markets; strengthening 26 domestic capital markets; encouraging regional integration; committing the private sector to work together with governments to help achieve a successful market economy for generating investment.
A key feature of CBC was its global membership, comprising corporate members from both developed and developing countries. This gave CBC the capacity to make a special contribution to the debate on corporate citizenship, dominated by developed countries.
Purpose
The CBC worked to involve private sector engagement in facilitating the implementation of an Information Communications Technologies for Development programme.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Commonwealth Business Council” is organization. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Commonwealth, Business and Council, not as a finished interpretation.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5153705. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1997 and 2014.
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This entry incorporates text from “Commonwealth Business Council” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.