WTO: State of Play

Bridges International Trade Weekly contains an excellent analysis of where the WTO Round is sitting. It is not encouraging reading. What the Bridges article omits is references to serious disquiet from the services sectors in many major economies (services make up 70% or more of GDP in most countries including New Zealand). The Hive understands that serious lobbying is going on in capitals on this and that services lobbyists are lobbying WTO Director-General Lamy direct, to express disquiet over the tactics that Lamy is proposing to progress the services component of negotiations. To date, nothing of any value has been agreed on services in the multi-year negotiation, yet the mandate for the negotiation suggests that liberalisation of services is as important as liberalisation of agricultural and non-agricultural goods. For the record over 90% of GDP in Wellington is derived from services activity. An excellent example of this was a case study presented at a New Zealand Trade and Enterprise sponsored breakfast this morning at which the New Zealand Translation Centre explained how it had achieved such spectacular growth in exports in recent years. The potential for more success stories such as this is enormous so long as barriers can be negotiated away.