Services in Doha: What’s on the Table?

By Batshur Gootiiz, Aaditya Mattoo. Journal of World Trade, 2009

128 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Services trade reform matters, but what is Doha doing about it? It has been hard to judge because of the opaqueness of services policies and the opaqueness of the request-offer negotiating process. This paper attempts to assess what is on the table. It presents the results of the first survey of applied trade policies in the major services sectors of fifty-six industrial and developing countries. These policies are then compared with these countries’ Uruguay Round (UR) commitments in services and the best offers that they have made in the current Doha negotiations. The paper finds that at this stage, Doha promises greater security of access to markets but not any additional liberalization. Uruguay Round commitments are on average 2.3 times more restrictive than current policies. The best offers submitted so far as part of the Doha negotiations improve on Uruguay Round commitments by about 13% but remain on average 1.9 times more restrictive than actual policies. The World Trade Organization’s (WTO’s) Hong Kong Ministerial had set out ambitious goals for services, but the analysis here shows that much remains to be done to achieve them.

Subfields: Development, Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/942b50384c43c32d199131afe5968ba73b3c5309

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Citations in the corpus

Policy Barriers to International Trade in Services: Evidence from a New Database (2012, unknown): “Borchert, Gootiiz, and Mattoo (2011) compare the Uruguay Round commitments (which are legally binding) and the Doha offers (which have no legal status as yet) with actual policy.22 A central finding from this exercise is that in all regions of the world, actual policy is substantially more liberal…”
Non-tariff barriers, integration and the transatlantic economy (2015, background): “A similar message is provided by Borchert et al. (2011), who note that in general GATS commitments provide little in terms of binding commitments relative to actual policy.”
Services Trade and Policy (2010, unknown): “36 Gootiiz and Mattoo (2009a) provide a recent comprehensive compilation and analysis of GATS commitments and compare these with new data on the restrictiveness of applied policies.”