Should China Join the WTO's Service Agreement
Book Details
PublisherPennyhill Press
ISBN / ASINB00IYTR8LI
ISBN-13978B00IYTR8L4
Sales Rank502,685
MarketplaceUnited States 🇺🇸
Description
As the Doha round of the World Trade Organization (WTO) enters its 13th year, the goal of a comprehensive multilateral agreement including all of the WTO’s 159 members and addressing their major points of disagreement remains elusive. As a result, the negotiators have been scaling back their ambitions for a “single undertaking†agreement under which “nothing is agreed to until everything is agreed by everyone.â€
Rather than reach a massive and allen compassing outcome, negotiators are aiming instead for a series of smaller agreements, a process known as “early harvest.†Last year, early harvest talks focused on three agreements: trade facilitation, information technology, and trade in services. A deal on trade facilitation, which removes onerous customs procedures, was successfully concluded at the Bali summit in early December, the first multilateral deal to succeed in the stalled Doha round.* But this modest achievement was overshadowed by the failure to sign an Information Technology Agreement (ITA), to update the 1997 ITA. Many parties, including the United States, blamed Beijing for not offering acceptable terms to join the other members of the ITA.
In this climate – one of momentum mixed with frustration – negotiations on the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) are slowly progressing. The talks, currently comprising 22 countries plus the European Union (28 member states),†began in May of 2013 and entered their sixth round on February 17. TISA aims to update the 1994 General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). Since the original GATS, globalization has lowered the cost and widened the scope of services that are provided across borders, such as engineering and information & communications. TISA seeks not only to open services sectors, but also to develop new rules, like those applied to government procurement of services, licensing procedures or access to communication networks (see table 1). Many U.S. services companies now do business globally and stand to gain more from open flows of capital, labor, goods, and data than from protection against foreign competition back home.
Rather than reach a massive and allen compassing outcome, negotiators are aiming instead for a series of smaller agreements, a process known as “early harvest.†Last year, early harvest talks focused on three agreements: trade facilitation, information technology, and trade in services. A deal on trade facilitation, which removes onerous customs procedures, was successfully concluded at the Bali summit in early December, the first multilateral deal to succeed in the stalled Doha round.* But this modest achievement was overshadowed by the failure to sign an Information Technology Agreement (ITA), to update the 1997 ITA. Many parties, including the United States, blamed Beijing for not offering acceptable terms to join the other members of the ITA.
In this climate – one of momentum mixed with frustration – negotiations on the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) are slowly progressing. The talks, currently comprising 22 countries plus the European Union (28 member states),†began in May of 2013 and entered their sixth round on February 17. TISA aims to update the 1994 General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). Since the original GATS, globalization has lowered the cost and widened the scope of services that are provided across borders, such as engineering and information & communications. TISA seeks not only to open services sectors, but also to develop new rules, like those applied to government procurement of services, licensing procedures or access to communication networks (see table 1). Many U.S. services companies now do business globally and stand to gain more from open flows of capital, labor, goods, and data than from protection against foreign competition back home.
