Its charter recognises that the sovereignty of individual member countries is absolute and inviolate. Given the limitations to the authority of the WTO, a major challenge for participating countries is to find a way to include ‘behind-the-borders’ barriers in the market opening offers they take to the negotiation table. If multilateral trade negotiations continue to reduce protection without bringing these into account, there will be little scope for the WTO to open world markets for services.
Any response to the problem facing the WTO in dealing with services must therefore satisfy two conditions:
• it must encourage and enable individual governments participating in multilateral trade negotiations to identify, and bring to the negotiating table, their own ‘behind-the-border’ barriers to trade; and
• it must leave them in full control of domestic policy.
An initiative that meets these conditions has been proposed by Australia and New Zealand business and industry organizations – The Tasman Transparency Group (TTG). The relevance of the TTG initiative, however, is not limited to tackling ‘behind-the-border’ barriers. It recognises that all the national gains available from liberalising in a multilateral context depend on what each country takes to the negotiating table, not what they hope to take away from it.
The domestic transparency initiative they propose is on TTG’s website: http://www.tasmantransparencygroup.com
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Related post:
Services negotiations in the WTO are stuck: What is the circuit breaker?