Paying the Price for Joining the WTO : A Comparative Assessment of Services Sector Commitments by WTO Members and Acceding Countries, Economic Paper 54

by Grynberg, Roman; Ognivtsev, Victor; Razzaque, Mohammed A.

• ISBN13: 9780850927504
• ISBN10: 0850927501
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-11-01
• Publisher: Stylus Pub Llc

Summary

This paper focuses on the accession process for new WTO membership. The basic premise is that the commitments demanded are too onerous for new members. It argues that the whole process is fundamentally flawed and, in fact, forces applicant countries to accept demands that are not required under WTO agreements. Section 2 is a brief discussion of the process of accession and highlights the inherent flaws. Section 3 focuses on one of the crucial international trade agreements, the General Agreement in Trade and Services (GATS) and provides sector-specific commitments by countries. Section 4 uses a series of statistical tests to verify whether acceding countries have made significantly higher number of specific commitments than existing WTO members. Section 5 makes some concluding observations. The paper uses a strong body of econometric evidence to support its claim that acceding countries undertake greater commitments than those made by WTO members of a similar development status.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations	p. vi
Executive Summary	p. vii
Introduction	p. 1
The Process of Accession to the WTO	p. 3
GATS and Sector Specific Services Commitments	p. 9
GATS and Types of Services	p. 9
Specific Commitments	p. 10
Comparison of Specific Commitments	p. 17
Mean Commitments of Original WTO Members and Acceded Members	p. 17
Commitments by Income Status of Countries	p. 18
Commitments, Per Capita Income and Acceding Countries	p. 22
Commitments, Per Capita Income and Exports	p. 28
Costs of Accession: Actual versus Predicted Commitments	p. 31
Concluding Observations	p. 39
References	p. 43
Appendices
Services Sectoral Classification	p. 45
Summary of Specific Commitments in the Services Sectors at the 1-digit Level	p. 48
Commitments by Countries at the 2-digit Level	p. 51
Commitments by Countries at the Most Disaggregated Level	p. 54
Cross-country Relationship between PPP GDP Per Capita and Number of Commitments at the 3-digit Level	p. 57
Cross-country Relationship between Export-GDP Ratio and Number of Commitments at the 3-digit Level	p. 58
Actual Less Predicted Commitments at the 3-digit Level based on All Countries in the Regression Model (Column 4 under 3-digit level commitments in Table 14)	p. 59
Actual Less Predicted Commitments at the 3-digit Level based on Regression Coefficient Excluding Acceding Countries and EC as a Single Unit	p. 60
Actual Less Predicted Commitments at the 3-digit Level based on All Countries in Regression Model and EC as a Single Unit	p. 61
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