Azevedo, currently Brazil's ambassador to the 159-nation WTO, pipped the former Mexican trade chief in a final round, the sources said on Tuesday, after seven other candidates stumbled earlier in the contest.
Azevedo and Blanco's campaign teams emerged tight-lipped from a meeting behind closed doors with Pakistan's WTO ambassador Shahid Bashir, who heads its Governing General Council.
No formal announcement was due until Wednesday, when WTO members were scheduled to meet to discuss the contest, while a General Council session next week will need to give Azevedo formal approval.
The WTO does not hold elections, but picks its chief by consensus, and along with his counterparts from Canada and Sweden, Bashir has spent weeks gauging countries' views on who is likely to muster the most support.
The current head of the WTO is Frenchman Pascal Lamy — a former trade chief of the European Union — who is due to step down on September 1st after two four-year terms at the helm.
His successor will face the tough task of trying to breath life into the WTO's moribund "Doha Round" of trade liberalisation talks, launched in 2001 with the goal of using international commerce to boost development in poorer member states.
On the eve of Tuesday's meeting, Blanco's campaign team had been in upbeat mode, telling AFP that without crying victory, they were "very, very confident".
Blanco, a 62-year-old economist, enjoys the reputation of a trade heavyweight.
He was Mexico's negotiator for the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, served as a minister of commerce and also boasts solid private sector credentials.
He and Azevedo repeatedly flagged up their broad support across a range of nations and economic levels, from the poorest to the richest, and had pitched a similar vision for breaking the Doha deadlock.
But 55-year-old Azevedo's insider status appeared to have clinched the contest for the Brazilian.
He has been Brazil's WTO ambassador since 2008, after working as a chief litigator in high-profile trade disputes, making him well placed to navigate the system to try to clear the Doha logjam.
The Doha Round, launched at a summit in Qatar in 2001, aims to open markets and remove trade barriers such as subsidies, excessive taxes and regulations, in order to harness international commerce to develop poorer economies.
But the concessions needed have sparked clashes notably between China, the EU, India and the United States, and Lamy's replacement will need to build bridges.
An unprecedented nine names entered the race to succeed Lamy.
Since it was created in its current form in 1995, the WTO's chiefs have been Irish, Italian, New Zealander and Thai, and with Frenchman Lamy in charge since 2005, emerging economies were long keen to claim the slot.
Those who stumbled in the first round in mid-April were from Kenya, Ghana, Jordan and Costa Rica, while Indonesia, South Korea and New Zealand exited the race in the second round at the end of the month.
WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION
Brazilian diplomat tipped to head WTO: sources
Brazil's Roberto Azevedo has beaten Mexican veteran Herminio Blanco in the race to become the new leader of the Geneva-based World Trade Organization, sources close to the process say.
ECONOMIC GROWTH
WTO slashes global growth forecast for 2015
Sluggish economies and global conflicts are taking their toll on world commerce, the Geneva-based World Trade Organization said on Tuesday as it slashed its trade growth outlook for 2015.
"For trade growth it is important that you have certain elements present in the global economy (including) stability, predictability, and those things are not there right now," WTO chief Roberto Azevedo told reporters in Geneva.
With economies around the world still struggling to fully recover from the 2008 financial crisis, and with conflicts flaring in places like Ukraine and the Middle East, global trade is expanding far more slowly than anticipated a year ago.
The Ebola outbreak in west Africa, unusually harsh winter weather in the United States and collapsing world oil prices are also taking their toll, as are strong exchange rate fluctuations, Azevedo said.
"All of these things have effects, sometimes destabilising effects," Azevedo said.
On Tuesday, WTO said preliminary estimates showed global trade had expanded just 2.8 percent last year and was expected to swell only 3.3 percent this year.
A year ago, the WTO was singing a different tune.
Last April, it had forecast that trade would expand 4.6 percent in 2014 and 5.8 percent this year.
But it downgraded those predictions in September, to 3.1 percent and four percent respectively, before slashing them further on Tuesday.
"Trade growth has been disappointing in recent years due largely to prolonged sluggish growth in GDP following the financial crisis," Azevedo said.
"Looking forward, we expect trade to continue its slow recovery, but with economic growth still fragile and continued geopolitical tensions, this trend could easily be undermined," he warned.
Last year was the third consecutive year in which trade grew less than three percent, WTO said in a statement.
In fact, trade growth averaged just 2.4 percent between 2012 and 2014 — the slowest rate on record for a three-year period when trade was expanding.
Trade growth is expected to pick up in 2016 with an expansion of four percent, it said, warning though that going forward, trade growth looks set to remain well below the annual average of 5.1 percent seen since 1990.
Slow recovery
"We are cautiously forecasting that trade will continue its slow recovery," Azevedo told reporters.
WTO acknowledged though that "risks to the trade forecasts are mostly on the downside."
Trade is a key measure of the health of the global economy, which it both stimulates and reflects.
But Azevedo warned Tuesday that a systemic shift might be under way and that trade expansion would no longer far outstrip overall economic growth as it has largely done for decades.
"The rough two-to-one relationship that prevailed for many years between world trade growth and world GDP growth appears to have broken down," WTO said.
The organization noted that "the 2.8 percent rise in world trade in 2014 barely exceeded the increase in world GDP for the year, and forecasts for trade growth in 2015 and 2016 only surpass expected output growth by a small margin."
Azevedo said that the 2015 forecast was based on an assumption that global GDP would expand by nearly three percent, while the 2016 forecast depended on economic growth reaching over three percent.
The International Monetary Fund announced later Tuesday that it expects to see global growth at a tepid 3.5 percent this year, and 3.8 percent next year.
WTO meanwhile said developing countries were expected to see exports rise 3.6 percent this year, while their imports were set to jump 3.7 percent.
In developed countries, exports and imports were set to rise just 3.2 percent, it said.
Asia was expected to have the strongest export rise at five percent, followed by North America at 4.5 percent.
The weakest export growth this year is predicted to come in South America with just 0.2 percent.
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