Post Date : 99-10-12
During the week of September 27 to October 1, 2010, the WTO convened the third services cluster, the second meeting after the stocktaking exercise held in March 2010. Taiwan dispatched two capital-based and three high-ranking WTO mission-based officials to attend these services cluster meetings for the purpose of protecting Taiwan’s trade benefits.

Moreover, discussions among WTO Members in attendance at the Council for Trade in Services and its four subsidiary committees and working parties principally concentrated on services-related technical issues, including two background notes of postal and courier services and environmental services, the relationship between old and new commitments and its protocol language, classification and scheduling issues, draft disciplines of domestic regulations, subsidies measures provided by nine Members, including Taiwan, pursuant to the work program on information exchange, the impact caused by e-commerce and e-banking on financial services, and so on. Without a doubt, these discussions on services-related technical issues can effectively assist WTO Members in better understanding the importance of and further supporting the development of international trade in services more so than in the past, particularly for developing countries.

Nevertheless, the negotiations on market access of services were relatively passive, thus no breakthrough occurred. Similarly, huge gaps persist, which are difficult to bridge in the short run. For instance, issues regarding how much coverage in services sectors and subsectors as well as what levels of commitments each WTO Member needs to undertake, especially regarding the developed countries like the U.S. and EU. as well as developing countries like China and India. During this services cluster week, a few Members that actively joined the negotiations and submitted new proposals, such as Pakistan, EU., the U.S., and Hong Kong, held several bilateral and plurilateral meetings to bring about more market-opening ambitions. Even though some Members recommended numerous constructive ways and provided creative ideas to kick-start and revive the stalled negotiations, others felt that further progress on services negotiations would completely rely upon the agriculture and non-agricultural market access (NAMA) negotiations to which WTO Members have been a bit pessimistic.

Generally speaking, Taiwan, as an active WTO Member, strongly believes that if this negotiation round of the Doha Development Agenda (DDA), initiated in 2001, is concluded as soon as possible, it will make a substantial contribution to the prosperity of the world economy and the well-being of everyone, especially so to the services market’s growth as a new engine and to the further increase of the volume of cross-border trade in services.