Negotiating Trade in Services: A Practical Guide for Developing Countries
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highlights the potential payoff of targeted trade-related technical assistance aimed at providing developing-country suppliers with economic intelligence on the conditions and opportunities for access to, for example, export markets, distribution channels, information on product standards, and business-to-business dialoguing and networking. The ultimate strategy in service negotiations and the position papers, offers, requests, and other relevant documents needed to implement the strategy must also reflect awareness of matters unrelated to services. Trade negotiations are typically organized as a single undertaking, whereby nothing is agreed until everything has been agreed. Thus, service negotiations are often, if not always, part of a larger context that includes all sectors of an economy.8 As the Doha negotiations have made clear, negotiations on agriculture and industrial products exert a huge impact on the nature and pace of the negotiations on services, including what is being demanded, what is being offered, the overall approach to the negotiations, and even the outstanding rules and principles that may also be under negotiation. In addition to the concerns relating to the service sector, a negotiating strategy for services must therefore reflect an awareness of the limits and opportunities emerging from other elements of the single undertaking under negotiation. This draws attention to the need for policy coordination among the ministries and members of a country’s trade negotiating team. The range of pertinent concerns that arises in carrying out service negotiations is outlined in box 2.7.
Implementing Negotiated Outcomes The agreements emerging from the Uruguay Round established a broad set of obligations for developing economies that went well beyond the traditional border measures of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and included disciplines with a far wider development impact. This is clear in services, with their coverage of sectors such as finance, telecommunications, and transportation that possess critical economy-wide, infrastructural properties, as well as sectors in which a host of public policy concerns and sensitivities arise, such as health care, education, environmental, and audiovisual services. While trade-related capacity building has contributed to the ability of developing economies to formulate and negotiate national strategies in trade, this does not necessarily mean that they are able to implement trade agreements, nor does it guarantee the availability of the resources required to cover the significant recurring costs that new trade rules in