Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest • Volume 12 • Number 26 • 16th July 2008
Senior Officials Prepare for Services ‘Signalling Conference’
Senior officials from about 25 WTO Member states met on 14 July to set the stage for services talks next week. Discussions at the meeting, which was chaired by WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy, mainly concerned procedural issues in preparation for the ’signalling conference’ that has been scheduled for 24 July. At that conference, ministers from WTO Member states that have been active in the services negotiations will be asked to ’signal’ the commitments they are prepared to make in various modes and sectors of services trade.
While signals made at the conference are non-binding and are not equivalent to final offers of liberalisation commitments, the intention is that Members will indicate their willingness to undertake binding commitments to open up their services sectors to foreign competition, thus providing an overview of improvements to standing offers (see BRIDGES Weekly, 14 May 2008, http://www.ictsd.org/weekly/08-05-14/wtoinbrief.htm).
Services ‘demandeurs’ such as the EU and the US say that such indications are necessary, as they need to know what a services agreement might look like before they sign off on tariff-cutting deals in the agricultural and industrial sectors. Agreement on those issues is necessary to bring next week’s high-level meeting to a successful end.
Until now, standing commitment offers on market access in services have been in general considered very weak, in both quantity and quality. However, the EU and US are not the only ones expecting more liberalisation; developing members such as India have also made demands, as they have much to gain from the opening of domestic services markets through temporary cross-border labour movement - ‘Mode 4′ in WTO services parlance.
Liberalisation of the provision of service through Mode 4 is widely believed to offer significant potential returns for developing countries. Indeed, several African Members have indicated that a deal that lacks liberalisation in Mode 4 will not have their support (see BRIDGES Weekly, 19 December 2007, http://www.ictsd.org/weekly/07-12-19/story5.htm).
Sources reveal that there will be services meetings at various levels in the final days leading up to the ministerial conference, which is set to begin on 21 July. Lamy emphasised at the 14 July meeting that many of services-related discussions that take place during the ministerial week will be bilateral. Such two-way discussions will be critical to the success of the signalling conference, Lamy said.
ICTSD reporting.