The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) include various aspects in relation to sustainable development. Developed countries and developing countries are advancing their commitments to SDGs. But in the framework of SDGs, the action of trade has been underestimated. Trade helps to keep services, goods and capital flowing. Apart from promoting targets in SDG 17, trade can also provide economic growth, innovation, infrastructure and the development of sustainable communities. 

Trade and SDGs:

• Encourage cooperation: successful trade requires its participants to engage in collaborative, multistakeholder partnerships and to reach across regions and boundaries, which are also encouraged by SDG 17; 
• Circulate knowledge: besides promoting the move of goods, trade also serves as a kind of conduct by which knowledge, ideas, innovations, and technologies can be distributed, shared and exchanged to transform lives in underdeveloped regions;
• Provide access to new opportunities: Trade helps to provide people across the world with the connections to investment, financing, better technologies and markets. It also provide people with the tools to improve quality of life, increase incomes, boost their purchasing power and gain the food security; 
• Generate shared benefits: trade provides a two-way benefits because buyers and sellers have a mutual incentive to exchange services and goods. People in developing regions can generate new incomes for purchase of consumer goods. 

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People in developed nations can have more choices in selecting the available goods for consumer. According to this, trade, whether local, regional or international, plays an indispensable role in improving the livelihoods of people across the world. Thus, it should be considered like other factors in SDGs when providing and designing solutions for sustainable development.