Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest • Volume 8 • Number 33 • 6th October 2004
Officials Meet On Gats Mode 4, Migration
Representatives from the international trade and migration communities met in Geneva on 4-5 October for a conference organised jointly by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), the World Bank (WB), and the WTO. The event, entitled "Managing the movement of people: what can be learned for Mode 4 of the WTO General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS)," was a follow-up to a similar conference held in November 2003. Conference sessions focused on unilateral, bilateral, and regional arrangements for managing the movement and temporary stay of workers in the hopes of clarifying the role and potential of GATS Mode 4 in facilitating the temporary movement of service workers. The issue is of particular importance to developing countries who have pushed for greater consideration of Mode 4 services at the WTO for a number of years. Participants made it clear that although Mode 4 migration was a very small part of global migration flows, and was a small part of trade liberalisation efforts, the conference provided an important opportunity for bringing together trade and migration officials to discuss and understand each other and how to unite the fields in upcoming services negotiations at the WTO.
In his summary and analysis of the conference, World Bank Lead Economist Aaditya Matoo suggested that GATS Mode 4 differs from unilateral, bilateral, and regional agreements in that within GATS, the Most Favoured Nation clause applies — that is, host countries choosing to open sectors for foreign workers must do so for all countries on a non-discriminatory basis. He noted that under GATS Mode 4, the only obligation is for host countries to grant market access, thereby foregoing the pre-, during, and post-movement responsibilities often included in unilateral, bilateral, and regional agreements for host and origin countries. Such conditionalities, which include pre-movement screening of potential migrants by host countries, and post-movement responsibilities of ensuring the migrants return to the country of origin, have become increasingly abundant in unilateral, bilateral, and regional treaties in the context of fears of irregular migration, security threats, proper qualifications, and failure of temporary migrants to return home. Matoo suggested that such non-trade concerns must be incorporated into GATS liberalisation. He also noted that GATS has a real role to play insofar as multilateral action can focus on contractual service providers, eliminate inequalities in bilateral granting of access, create a balance of offers, and grant flexibility in migration flows, for example by tying quantities of permitted migrants into a country to unemployment rates in that country.
Anya Oram of the European Commission also noted the importance of building mutual trust between host and origin governments. She suggested including a broader range of ideas relating to migration, such as social security, worker rights, and security, into further GATS Mode 4 discussions. She cautioned, however, about being too ambitious on the scope of Mode 4. Sergio Marchi, former Ambassador of Canada to the WTO and Commissioner, Global Commission on International Migration, said that migration and trade officials appear to approach migration from cross purposes; migration officials attempt to manage the migration of people and see the service rendered as somewhat incidental, whereas trade officials attempt to liberalise the provision of services and see the movement of people as somewhat incidental. Nonetheless, he stressed that both migration flows and trade liberalisation, despite their negative popular portrayal, have immense potential as a powerful and positive force to build countries. As such, he urged trade officials to consider the full range of migration issues to make GATS Mode 4 a more valuable instrument of migration, and urged migration officials to consider the nature of the trade negotiation framework, including the possibility of asymmetric offers within Mode 4 to balance other services offers, in their creation of a coherent migration system.
For further information on the conference, see http://www.iom.int/en/know/idm/tms_200410.shtml.
ICTSD Reporting; "WTO Chair Cites Absence of Initial Offers As Major Problems Facing Services Talks," WTO REPORTER, 5 September 2004.