ABU DHABI: Around 72 nations have agreed to take on additional obligations in services under the General Agreement on Goods in Services (GATS) to ease non-goods trade among themselves and extended the similar concessions to all other members of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
They have added these obligations under their schedules in GATS that seek to mitigate the unintended trade-restrictive effects of measures related to licensing requirements and procedures, qualification requirements and procedures and technical standards among themselves.
The disciplines will be applied on a “most-favoured nation” principle, meaning that they will benefit all WTO members. It will also benefit Indian professional companies which will now have equal opportunity to access markets in these 70 countries if they meet the standards. These disciplines have been named Services Domestic Regulation (DSR) and came into force on the second day of the 13th Ministerial Conference of the WTO on Tuesday.
A new research by the WTO says the implementation (new obligations) will help reduce services trade costs by 10% for lower-middle income economies and 14% for upper- middle income economies with overall savings of $ 127 billion. If all WTO members implement the disciplines, large welfare and trade increases are projected, especially for developing economies.
By 2032, global real income is projected to increase by at least 0.3%, representing $301 billion and global service exports are expected to rise by 0.8%, amounting to $206 billion.
Albania, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Japan, Korea,New Zealand, Norway, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, the UK and the US are the members of the initiative.
The negotiations were initiated at the 11th Ministerial Conference in Buenos Aires in 2017. India insisted that these unilateral commitments should not be restricted to those joining the initiative but should be multilateral and extended to all. This proposal was agreed to in January of this year.
Source: The Financial Express
