S/CSC/M/22

S/CSC/M/24

S/CSC/M/25

S/CSC/M/27

World Trade
Organization RESTRICTED S/CSC/M/20
7 June 2001 (01-2784) Committee on Specific Commitments

REPORT OF THE MEETING HELD ON 9 MAY 2001

Note by the Secretariat

The Committee on Specific Commitments held a meeting on 9 May 2001.
The questions were: "On what basis do those Members who are opposed to using the definitions contained in the CPC intend to identify specific services, if it were the case that the use of the CPC definitions was rejected?
At the previous meeting, the representative of the European Communities had announced that his delegation was considering technical comments which had been forwarded informally by several delegations.
She wondered whether at the end, if and when the W/120 was revised, the bolded titles would be preserved with corresponding CPC numbers across from them only, or whether what was under the bolded titles, in the Classes and Services column, would be retained instead in a revised W/120.
It was necessary to indicate clearly in the schedule what part exactly was covered by the commitment, since in case of a dispute a determination of which services were, and which were not, covered would have to be made.
His delegation had also noted in that meeting that the submissions that the US and others had made in the Special Session on this sector could provide further ideas for work either in the Special Session or in the Committee.
there was a need to reflect in any classification list the different regulatory systems that WTO Members might have in the sector; second, the need to evaluate carefully the correspondence of energy activities with the CPC categories, taking into account the specific characteristics of the energy sectors; and third, the need to exclude the non-services activities from any classification list.
One important point to bear in mind in relation to all the classification work was that a balance had to be struck between, first, a classification that was focused enabling Members to make commitments, and second, a classification flexible enough to accommodate the differences among Members' internal regulatory frameworks.
During previous meetings some Members had stated their support for these proposals, others had expressed preference for the current W/120 classification, and a third group had considered that the distinction between host/home/third country and international law, followed frequently by Members in their schedules, was the best solution.
For instance, the distinction at the regulatory level in the EC was not between postal and courier services but rather between those services which were reserved to the public postal operator, universal service provider, and those which were opened to competition.
The fact was that the proposal that the US had made in the Committee had been overtaken by the proposal made in the Special Session.
dated 22 September 1999) suggesting to clarify the classification of multistage or turn key construction projects and to examine the merits of the creation of an "integrated construction services" item in the classification.
She underlined that the UNSD opinion had no legal value for the Committee by itself, as it would have to be endorsed by Members to become an element of interpretation for future commitments.
His delegation wanted to reflect further as it was torn between the extent of necessary changes and its preference for preserving as much as possible the W/120 intact so as to use it as a basis for the market access negotiations.
The latter needed to choose among the various services sub-sectors those that had the greatest potential for exports, or if they needed to increase the supply of a service into their markets, they would have greater possibilities of attaching the necessary conditions to carry out national policy objectives.

Regarding how to proceed with the on-going work on classification, she said that in her consultations some delegations had said that given the fact that negotiating proposals covering the sectors under discussion in the CSC had been, or would be, submitted to the CTS Special Session, it might be desirable to seek guidance from the CTS before introducing any changes to the CSC course of action.
Initially she had felt that Members did not wished to advance work at that stage, except for environment; however, some interest in other sectors had been expressed.
Regarding the objectives, it was fundamental for Members to address some questions: first, what Members wanted from classification; second, what Members wanted to do with W/120; and thirdly, why Members did not want to use the CPC UN classification system.
The dilemma faced by Members was that changes in W/120 could lead to uncertainty of existing commitments, which would be a negative outcome, on the other hand, introducing necessary changes could lead to greater clarity in future commitments, which was desirable.
As to whether the objective of the classification work during the year should be something else, such a suggestion did not seem appropriate as priority should be given to the conclusion of on-going work.
From a practical view point, however, some of the outstanding classification issues might need more time than expected, so the possibility of having discussions on the classification issues in parallel with the request-and-offer process should not be foreclosed.
The discussion of the proposals in that forum would help identify what needed to be done and thus help move beyond conceptual discussions conducted in the Committee thus far due to lack of concrete commercial basis to dealing with the problems.
There was merit in one point made by Japan and Australia that it might be a good opportunity to allow the Special Session of the CTS to provide the Committee with guidance as appropriate on how to take forward the classification work.
He took note of the statement by the US regarding the W/120 not having legal value and stated that Brazil's schedule, which had legal value, had been largely based on the W/120, which explained the concerns with revising the W/120.
The inclusion of classification issues in the proposals had moved in practice the classification discussion that had been conducted in the CSC to the area of the negotiations.
The technical issues involved in the proposed amendments were complex and while interested in evaluating the proposed amendments to the classifications, his delegations felt that discussions along those lines would be dependent on the discussions of negotiating proposals.

Regarding possible new subjects in addition to classification, the Chairperson recalled that her note had mentioned some possible topics, namely, MFN exemptions and procedures for the presentation of requests and offers, which had been suggested by Members during her consultations.
As for MFN exemptions, two procedural aspects had been mentioned: first, to revise an informal note by the Secretariat on the listing of MFN exemptions (Listing of Article II exemptions – Explanatory note by the Secretariat, Job No.

S/CSC/M/21

S/CSC/M/28

S/CSC/M/32

World Trade
Organization RESTRICTED S/CSC/M/19
27 April 2001 (01-2131) Committee on Specific Commitments

REPORT OF THE MEETING HELD ON 22 MARCH 2001

Note by the Secretariat

The Committee on Specific Commitments held a meeting on 22 March 2001.

SCHEDULING GUIDELINES
The Chairman recalled that at the previous formal meeting the Committee had agreed that it could realistically aim at finalizing the revision of the scheduling guidelines by the best endeavour deadline of March 2001 for completion of the on-going work.
The issue which was dealt with in paragraph 28 was a matter of principle to the EC and from the start her delegation had been arguing that the expression "services embodied in exported goods", with the relevant examples, was the correct expression and thus no change was appropriate.
Having "could" in that sentence would help Members to understand that they may choose for their own reasons to indicate if a market access reservation was also a national treatment reservation and to that extent Canada could certainly support that.
Particularly the first sentence of that paragraph where it said that an unbound could amount to some kind of reservation potentially setting up a contradiction with paragraph 46, which defined "unbound" as leaving the Member free on a given sector and mode of supply to introduce or maintain measures inconsistent with market access or national treatment.
His authorities considered that two options should be available for Members: the first option would be to indicate "none" in the national treatment column and this can be interpreted to mean that there was full commitment for the entire mode; the second could be to indicate "none for the commitment inscribed in the market access column" meaning thereby that national treatment commitment is not taken for the entire mode, but is related to the commitment.
As indicated by the Note, the discussion so far had covered construction, environment, energy, legal and postal but those did not represent the universe of classification issues.
The representative of Venezuela said that the Note presented a very useful recapitulation of the classification work on certain sectors, pointing out what Members had referred to as market realities which must in one way or another be reflected in classification for up-coming negotiations.
Her delegation would like to see a re-birth of the proactivity by other Members who had tabled initiatives under this subject and whose proposals, while not necessarily overlapping fully with Venezuela's criteria, were along satisfactory lines.
The Committee would not see any particular progress in those sectors under discussion any faster than any others that might come up, as negotiating proposals would bring forward more scheduling and classification issues.
Nevertheless, within certain services sectors there were certain activities which countries would like to protect from external competition and others which could be open to external competition.
Certainly with respect to some sectors there could be benefits in terms of disaggregation, namely: to understand the various facets of a sector; and in terms of looking at future negotiations on commitments and the ability to make commitments, in fact the flexibility associated with making commitments.
In any case, her delegation wanted to wait for the outcome of the stocktaking before deciding what further work on classification needed to be done and how to structure that work in CSC.
This would be particularly the case for a country like Venezuela whose economic foundations and commercial advantages depended on so many different aspects of the energy sector, which were far from being reflected in the categories established under W/120, namely services incidental to mining, services incidental to energy distribution and pipelines transport of fuel.
He observed that the US had a proposal before the CTS in Special Session, which was a comprehensive proposal, although exploratory, and the US expected that discussion of such a proposal in the CTS might provide some ideas for further work on classification at a technical level in the Committee.

The representative of the European Communities said that the fact that there was no energy section in W/120 made it clear that there was a need to evaluate what the universe of energy services in countries was, taking into account the fact that the energy universe was seen in different ways in WTO countries.
Secondly, specificities of this sector needed to be taken into account when trying to verify if energy services were present in the existing classification system; some activities could not be addressed in cross-sectoral terms because of the specific aspects of the activity.
Some Members preferred to individually define the notion of foreign legal consultancy but the lack of a common understanding would make it difficult to judge the balance of concessions among Members.

Production on a Fee or Contract basis

The representative of Japan shared the views contained in the Note as to this issue and concurred that there was no clear conclusion as to whether any future work was needed in this regard.
Furthermore, he posed three questions to those delegations that were not convinced about using definitions contained in the CPC: On what basis do those Members who are opposed to using the definitions contained in the CPC intend to identify specific services, if it were the case that the use of the CPC definitions was rejected?
referring to both postal and courier services because there were links between the two sectors, and flexible enough to accommodate various concerns and also sufficiently general to take into account future developments.
She recalled that the last formal meeting of the CSC had ended somewhat in a little bit of disarray because of time constraints, without a formal summary by the Chair of the informal classification discussion being provided, as had normally been the case in the past.
APPOINTMENT OF THE CHAIRPERSON
The Chairman recalled that he had come to the end of his tenure as Chairperson for the Committee and according to the Rules of Procedures the time had come to elect his successor.

World Trade
Organization RESTRICTED S/CSC/W/36
20 November 2002 (02-6451) Committee on Specific Commitments
DRAFT

REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON SPECIFIC COMMITMENTS
TO THE COUNCIL FOR TRADE IN SERVICES (2002)


Since its last report to the Council for Trade in Services, the Committee on Specific Commitments held five formal meetings between 30 November 2001 and 24 October 2002. The reports of these meetings are contained in documents S/CSC/M/21, 22, 23 and 23 Corr.1, 24 and

S/CSC/7

S/CSC/M/26

World Trade
Organization RESTRICTED S/CSC/M/16
11 September 2000 (00-3512) Committee on Specific Commitments


REPORT OF THE MEETING HELD ON 11 JULY 2000

Note by the Secretariat


The Committee on Specific Commitments held its sixteenth meeting on 11 July 2000. The agenda for the meeting was contained in WTO/AIR/1345. The Chairman announced he would make a statement on a request for observer status under other business.
It was so agreed.
CLASSIFICATION
The discussions on the classification of services sectors were held in informal mode during a meeting on 10 and 11 July 2000, which preceded the formal session. After these discussions the Chairman gave the following summary at the formal Committee meeting.
Production on a fee or contract basis
The Chairman asked the Secretariat to introduce a Note on the matter of “production on a fee or contract basis”, which contained elements which might be relevant to the discussions on classification in various serv

World Trade
Organization RESTRICTED S/CSC/M/36
14 April 2005 (05-1544) Committee on Specific Commitments


REPORT OF THE MEETING HELD ON 11 February 2005

Note by the Secretariat


The Committee on Specific Commitments (CSC) held a meeting on 11 February 2005. The agenda for the meeting is contained in WTO/AIR/2492. As no points were raised under Other Business, the agenda was adopted as proposed in the airgram.
A. Editorial Conventions for the Submission of revised offers
The Chairman recalled that editorial conventions for the submission of initial offers had been set out in JOB (02)/88. The purpose of these conventions was to facilitate the comparability of initial offers with existing schedules. As these conventions had been generally adhered to by Members, initial offers typically indicated new text in bold and deleted text in strikethrough; technical changes that did not alter the scope or substance of an existing commitment usually appeared in bold

S/CSC/M/30

World Trade
Organization RESTRICTED S/CSC/M/14
18 May 2000 (00-2031) Committee on Specific Commitments


REPORT OF THE MEETING HELD ON 11 AND 12 APRIL 2000

Note by the Secretariat


The Committee on Specific Committee held a meeting on 11 and 12 April 2000. The agenda for the meeting was contained in document WTO/AIR/1278. The Chairman also introduced an annotated agenda for this meeting, which was contained in document Job No. 2143. The Chairman raised an item under other business concerning a statement he intended to make on the status of the verification of electronic schedules process.
It was so agreed.
A. APPOINTMENT OF CHAIRPERSON

The Chairman recalled that the former Chairman of the Services Council, Mr Stuart Harbinson, had circulated a slate of names for the chairs of the services subsidiary bodies, including the Committee on Specific Commitments. The Chairman of the Council had said that in the absence of any objections by delegations, it sho

World Trade
Organization RESTRICTED S/CSC/M/15
29 June 2000 (00-2694) Committee on Specific Commitments



REPORT OF THE MEETING HELD ON 23 AND 24 MAY 2000

Note by the Secretariat


The Committee on Specific Committee held a meeting on 23 and 24 May 2000. The agenda for the meeting was contained in document WTO/AIR/1302. The Chairman raised an item under other business concerning a request for observer status before the Committee, submitted by the Universal Postal Union.
The agenda was so agreed.

A. SCHEDULING GUIDELINES

The Chairman recalled that at the past two meetings the Committee had structured its discussions along a Note by the Chairman containing comments and drafting suggestions on the outstanding issues. In those discussions a number of priority issues that could reasonably be solved had been identified, while putting aside others which were either too difficult or too marginal to be addressed usefully. On some of the priority issues many

World Trade
Organization RESTRICTED S/CSC/M/6
12 November 1998 (98-4544) Committee on Specific Commitments

REPORT OF THE MEETING HELD ON 16 OCTOBER 1998

Note by the Secretariat

The Committee on Specific Commitments held its sixth meeting on 16 October 1998 under the Chairmanship of Mr Juan Marchetti of Argentina.
He therefore introduced the informal document of the Secretariat compiling the points regarding classification made during that exercise (Job N°5353) and asked for comments on these documents and more generally on the way to fulfill the mandate given by the Council.
He suggested that the most useful approach might be to develop general definitions of sectors or subsectors on which all could agree and which might be used in schedules, perhaps in the form of headnotes.
Hence while reserving its position on the final outcome of the work, he indicated that Japan would not oppose the continuation of the work provided that the following principles were respected: if changes were to be made they must: 1) be kept to the minimum necessary, 2) be written in a clear manner indicating the concordances and differences with the former definitions, and 3) not entail any changes in or reinterpretation of existing commitments.
New Zealand approved the Australian idea of a technologyneutral approach and pointed out that up to now the discussion on new services had failed to produce results due to the absence of concrete examples and to the difficulty of distinguishing in the abstract between a new technology or a new way to deliver a service and a new service strictly speaking.
Australia indicated that it agreed with most of the ideas expressed by New Zealand, in particular on the need to establish a presumption of compatibility of unspecified licencing entries with Articles XVI and XVII and the need not to leave the question of technical feasibility to the decision of individual Members but rather to achieve a commonly agreed list, taking into account the specificities of different sectors and modes and their technological evolution.
The Chairman suggested two possible approaches to the discussion of the scheduling guidelines: the Committee might undertake a collective reading of the guidelines, paragraph by paragraph, and the Secretariat might be asked to produce a factual note on the difficulties or questions it had encountered in the interpretation and the use of the guidelines.

World Trade
Organization RESTRICTED S/CSC/M/17
24 November 2000 (00-5023) Committee on Specific Commitments


REPORT OF THE MEETING HELD ON 4 OCTOBER 2000

Note by the Secretariat


The Committee on Specific Commitments held its seventeenth meeting on 4 October 2000. The agenda for the meeting was contained in WTO/AIR/1378. No points were raised under other business.
The agenda was so agreed.

A. CLASSIFICATION
The discussions on the classification of services sectors had been held in informal mode during a meeting on 3 and 4 October 2000, which preceded the formal session. At the end of the informal discussions the Chairman gave the following summary to the full formal Committee.
Production on a fee or contract basis
Delegations continued to exchange views on the basis of the Note prepared by the Secretariat for the previous meeting and on a number of questions posed by the Chairman in the Annotated Agenda for the meeting. It was the general view that

World Trade
Organization S/CSC/3
2 December 1998 (98-4869) Committee on Specific Commitments



REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON SPECIFIC COMMITMENTS
TO THE COUNCIL FOR TRADE IN SERVICES


The Committee on Specific Commitments has held three formal meetings in 1998. The minutes of these meetings appear in documents S/CSC/M/5, 6 and 7. In its first formal meeting held on 2 April 1998, it elected Mr Juan A. Marchetti of Argentina as its Chairman. Six informal consultations on the finalization of the procedures for the implementation of GATS Article XXI (Modification of Schedules) have also been conducted by the Chairman of the Committee. The formal discussions of the Committee focused on three items: classification issues, the institution of a system of electronically consolidated and updated schedules and the possible revision of the scheduling guidelines.
As far as classification issues are concerned the activities of the Committee were twofold. First the Com

World Trade
Organization S/CSC/12
21 November 2006 (06-5593)


ANNUAL REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON SPECIFIC COMMITMENTS
TO THE COUNCIL FOR TRADE IN SERVICES (2006)


Since its Annual Report of 2005 to the Council for Trade in Services, the Committee on Specific Commitments held five formal meetings: on 22 September 2005, 8 February 2006, 10 April 2006, 22 June 2006, and 5 October 2006. During the reporting period, the Committee addressed four items: classification issues; scheduling issues; editorial conventions for the submission of the second round of revised offers; and relationship between new and old commitments.
Classification Issues
The Committee addressed a revised proposal on the classification of energy services from Indonesia (S/CSC/W/42/Rev.1 and S/CSC/W/42/Rev.1/Corr.1) at the first two meetings of the reporting period, and a second revision of the proposal (S/CSC/W/42/Rev.2) at the April and June 2006 meetings.
Informal discussions on cla

S/CSC/W/40

S/CSC/8

World Trade
Organization RESTRICTED S/CSC/M/33
21 July 2004 (04-3156) Committee on Specific Commitments



REPORT OF THE MEETING HELD ON 23 JUNE 2004

Note by the Secretariat


The Committee on Specific Commitments (CSC) held a meeting on 23 June 2004. The agenda for the meeting is contained in WTO/AIR/2336.
The Chairman suggested to delete item "C. Organization of Future Work" from the proposed agenda, and to address issues related to future work of the Committee under the items "A. Classification Issues", and "B. Scheduling Issues," respectively. Under Other Business, he intended to invite a representative from the Secretariat to inform the Committee on the ongoing work concerning electronic schedules.
The representative of Hong Kong, China wished to raise under Other Business the application of the procedures under Article XXI.
The Committee adopted the agenda with the proposed change and the addition of the items raised under Other Business.
Cla

World Trade
Organization RESTRICTED S/CSS/M/13
26 February 2002 (02-0955) Council for Trade in Services
Special Session

REPORT OF THE MEETING HELD ON 3-6 DECEMBER 2001

Note by the Secretariat

The Council for Trade in Services held a Special Session from 3 to 6 December 2001.
He viewed this as a useful suggestion, that he fully shared, not only for the valuable contribution that UNCTAD could provide on the issue, but also because the contribution of UNCTAD was explicitly recognized in other paragraphs of the Ministerial Declaration, such as paragraph 21, on trade and investment, and paragraph 24, on trade and competition.
However, given the large number of proposals submitted from countries with large service exporters, and the much smaller export capacity they had, they were anxious that, unless a thorough assessment was carried out based on the objectives of Article IV and those in the preamble of the GATS, and negotiations adjusted accordingly, the outcome of the negotiations might not bring them reciprocal benefits.
In parallel with a country-by-country exercise, the WTO Secretariat, in collaboration with other relevant international organizations, could be asked to produce an updated analysis of international trade in services based on available data and provide an overview and summary of the available information laid down in various special analysis and studies submitted by Members, such as the informal submissions by South Africa and Norway.
Turning to more specific comments, he noted that section I of the paper, which cited a number of objectives within the WTO with respect to services, left out perhaps the most important objective, which was the liberalization objective of the GATS, which for his delegation was the overall criterion for the assessment.
He could accept in principle the outline for the symposium on the assessment in document JOB(01)/160, but noted, with respect to section 6, that many Members, including Hong Kong, China, had conducted their own assessment of the economic impact of services liberalization and wondered whether, in light of the timeframe envisaged, Members who might not be able to make a presentation could provide written contributions to share their experience in that regard.
But there had been a number of useful contributions to the exercise, such as the Secretariat Note in document S/CSS/W/117, Costa Rica's inputs, MERCOSUR's comments, the submission in document S/CSS/W/114 and the comments it had generated and the new submission presented by the delegation of Zambia.
The Secretariat had prepared a brief Note, circulated as JOB(01)/141, summarizing the broad views expressed by delegations on the five main groups of issues under discussion, namely definition of basic concepts; the relationship between negotiations and autonomous liberalization; assessment of the value of liberalization measures undertaken autonomously; transparency; and bilateral/multilateral treatment of autonomous liberalization.
That being said, he considered that the main obstacle to have a common approach applicable to all Members was that the value of individual autonomous liberalization measures might vary from country to country and this obstacle should be taken into account.
The last sentence of Article XIX:3 of the GATS, as well as paragraph 13 of the Negotiating Guidelines and Procedures, were clear on this issue and their general formulation did not support the attempts to limit the availability of credit and recognition for a certain group of Members.
Australia continued to believe that credit was what a Member would receive in exchange for binding a particular liberalizing measure, and that this credit would reflect the relative cost-benefit value to each side of binding such a measure.

Regarding the item on Recent Developments in Financial Services Trade, the delegation of the United States presented an informal paper, document JOB(01)/161, providing additional information on their domestic rule-making process, with particular emphasis on prior consultation procedures before new regulations were formally enacted.
On the basis of these suggestions, he had made two proposals as to how to organize future work on the Working Party, on which delegations agreed: firstly, taking as a basis the different elements of the Synopsis that he had circulated under his own responsibility in August 2001, delegations could examine where, in their opinion, there were common elements, and where their positions differed; and secondly, they could examine what elements could be common both to a horizontal safeguard mechanism and to a sector-specific mechanism, or scheduled safeguard.
The reason he was raising the issue at that point was that he was of the view that the discussion of the negotiating proposals under item D would help inform deliberations under the following agenda item, as well as the Council's decision on whether to schedule a Special Session meeting in February 2002, in addition to the one already planned for March.
In its negotiating proposals, Canada had attempted to identify and address some issues of interest to developing countries, such as commitments in mode 4 not linked to commercial presence, barriers for the smaller service suppliers, the possibility of developing a mechanism for phasing-in commitments in certain sectors, or, with respect to the strengthening of the domestic services capacity of developing countries, as indicated in Article IV:1(a), the importance of industry associations in the distribution sector to better maintain and inform domestic regulatory practices.
The representative of Japan said that Korea's submission was useful and that his delegation shared its main thrust, and particularly paragraph 2, stating that flexibility was granted under strict conditions, paragraph 3, noting that the flexibility in the Annex on MFN Exemptions was procedural, and the last sentence and conclusion reached in paragraph 4.
In addition, given that many of these exemptions had no specified duration, this might result in a permanent departure from the MFN principle, which would be against the letter and spirit of the GATS and the Annex on MFN Exemptions, which foresaw that exemptions last ten years in principle and in any event be removed through negotiations.
Movement of Natural Persons
The Chairman recalled that, in the course of the discussion on movement of natural persons at the July meeting, it had been agreed that the Secretariat would produce a note on economic needs tests and their application in all modes of supply, drawing upon available information in Members' schedules and work undertaken by other inter-governmental organizations.
Noting that paragraph 8 of the Secretariat Note stated that ENTs were most common in mode 3 and that Korea had said that Members should look at the relationship between ENTs and emergency safeguards in mode 4, he called for that relationship to be examined also in mode 3.
In reply to questions that his delegation had received concerning the content of such a reference paper, he stated that the United States legal community was currently exploring the possibility of something very similar to what had been proposed by Australia in W/67/Suppl.
The representative of the United States, speaking on classification issues, stated that, under the United States proposal, express delivery services would become one of six categories under the "communications services” classification.
This request had been considered by the regular session of the Council and it was decided to postpone consideration of the request, as the Members felt that the UPU would need to be an Observer before a MOU could be considered.
The delegate noted that, for developing countries that have implemented autonomous liberalisation, improvements in commitments on commercial presence could be facilitated if market access to sectors of interest to developing countries was also increased.

Referring to the United States statement with respect to the classification of basic versus value-added services, the representative of Brazil suggested that the conclusions put forth by the United States could be interpreted to imply that Internet telephony would be classified as a basic service.
(v) Construction and Related Engineering Services
The representative of New Zealand said that the focus of its proposal was on classification issues with the aim of allowing Members to make broad commitments to encompass the broad range of activities in the construction area.
This sector was one of the few in which developing countries had developed a certain degree of competitiveness, which was seriously hampered by the existence of trade-distorting subsidies granted mainly by developed countries.
With respect to market access and national treatment, he drew Members' attention to his delegation's proposal on distribution services, and reiterated their belief that commission agents' services and wholesale trade could be largely liberalized as they were aimed at a sophisticated clientele.
Its implementation was very important because Venezuela's interest, as a developing country, was to quantify the level of benefit that trade in services offered, taking into account that in most cases developing countries purchased services offered by developed countries.
The Mexican State reserved for itself the following strategic activities: the exploration and exploitation of crude oil and natural gas; the refining or processing of crude oil and gas; goods obtained from the refining or processing of crude oil and natural gas; and the production of artificial gas, basic petrochemical products, their inputs and ducts; international trade, transport, storage and distribution, including the first hand sale of crude oil, natural and artificial gas, and of goods obtained from the refining or processing of crude oil and natural gas as well as from basic petrochemical products.
Some key principles that should guide Members when preparing a first checklist for the sector should be a substantial coverage; an energy neutral approach, without distinctions between energy resources in principle and only taking those into account where necessary; and excluding activities regarding the operation of production, in line with what had already been discussed in the CSC.
On other issues, one proposal had pointed out that since energy services was a sector where governments continued to control directly, own or reserve to themselves, a significant portion of energy services activities, consideration should be given to whether market access commitments might need to be accompanied by government procurement commitments to ensure meaningful market access.
For the negotiation of such services it would be useful to have a model schedule, with a view to the incorporation of new services which were not envisaged in document W/120, but which would be specific to the sector and would not duplicate activities already covered in that document.
The submissions from Canada, the European Communities and Australia made reference to a core and related approach – although there appeared to be some dissension regarding whether the core should be W/120 as it currently was, or, as suggested by the EC, something broader.
The delegation stated it was necessary to recognize the interdependence of tourism with other sectors, including distribution, publicity services, construction and particularly air transport and, therefore, important for Members to look at barriers in tourism-related sectors, especially anti-competitive practices.
On market access and national treatment, Norway's goal was real and meaningful liberalization, through substantial commitments by more Members than at present, with full entry into force of the MFN principle, with few or no MFN exemptions.
Multimodal transport should be integrated into the negotiations and Australia was open to explore the different ways through which this outcome could be achieved, such as amendments to the existing model schedule or through a checklist approach.
Commitments should be considered not only in the three services explicitly mentioned by the annex but also for areas such as ground handling, services auxiliary to all modes of transport when delivered in an air transport context such as storage and warehousing and customs clearance services.
As for holding an additional meeting of the Special Session in February, he was open, but it was first important to be clear on the what the objectives of such a meeting would be, in order not to duplicate the work Members would be carrying out at the March meeting.
In this respect, he asked for understanding from those countries who were more advanced in terms of preparation for the market access negotiations themselves, as there could realistically be some delegations who might not be as ready as others in terms of requests and offers; he therefore called for flexibility with respect to those time-lines.
He had noted the suggestion made by one delegation that a workshop be held on how to prepare and handle negotiating requests in services and said that he would consult with the Secretariat on how such a workshop could be organized, with the aim of ensuring better and fuller participation in the negotiations.
He added that this was an issue that would be addressed by the Trade Negotiations Committee but also drew delegations' attention to the fact that, as a matter of practice, the Chairman's report to the General Council, which was drafted on the basis of an outline presented at the meeting, was circulated as an unrestricted document within a few days of the meeting.
The representative of the Secretariat said that he had been asked by the Chairman of the General Council to announce to the Membership that, following his consultations on the chairmanship of the Services Council, he would propose that Ambassador Jara of Chile continue to chair the Services Council for the balance of the tenure of Ambassador Amorim of Brazil, which was until the appointment of a new chairperson for the new year.

According to UNCTAD's 1999 Assessment, developing countries had made substantial commitments under the GATS with respect to many service industries, often binding recently adopted legislation or pre-committing future policies without having had much experience in their implementation, and had undertaken a higher share of full bindings under the cross-border and commercial presence modes of supply.
Hoekman had also pointed out that market access commitments by high-income countries tended to be restrictive with respect to activities where developing countries had a comparative advantage, both low and high-skill intensive labour activities, that required either temporary entry or establishment or work permits.
Examples showed that regional supply chains had emerged, such as in the textile and clothing sector; that, in particular in South Africa, the automotive industry was increasingly integrated into the global industry; that liberalization of the telecommunications sector had led to unprecedented growth in the penetration of mobile phones and access to the Internet.
He drew attention to document S/CSS/W/81, reporting on the work of the Intra-Agency Task Force on Statistics of International Trade in Services and especially on its adoption of the Manual on Statistics of International Trade in Services, which was compatible with existing statistical systems and especially the fifth edition of the Balance of Payments Manual.
For example, a country lacking computer software specialists could have liberalized access for such natural persons; whilst this could be of value to one Member, it might be of no interest to another, who might also be looking to attract software specialists.
As for the bilateral versus multilateral treatment of autonomous liberalization, she said that a mixed approach, by which a multilateral framework would be set up, within which credit and recognition would be worked out bilaterally or plurilaterally, might be a good starting point and she looked forward to further examining this issue.
Commenting on Switzerland's intervention, he recognized that the value of autonomous liberalization differed from Member to Member and that a bilateral approach would be preferable, but was concerned and sought clarification on the example given of mode 3 liberalization, which seemed to imply that, as already established suppliers might be negatively affected by further liberalization, this autonomous liberalization might be considered "negative" and that a "debit", rather than a credit, might ensue.
Second, the technology available enabled both postal and courier service providers to introduce updated processes of collection, classification, transport and delivery, as well as to modernize their management of the information generated through postal traffic, thus making it possible for them to offer services appropriate to the requirements of specific segments of society.
The proposal did not only cover construction services as defined in the W/120 services sectoral classification but also related professional services, given the relation between the supply of "physical" construction services and the supply of related professional services, such as architectural services, engineering, integrated engineering, urban planning and landscape architectural services.
As had been noted at the previous meeting, the definitions of small and medium-sized suppliers differed from Member to Member and his delegation had never intended to suggest a "one size fits all" solution.
Mexico therefore proposed that the agenda for the Special Session include the subject of MFN exemptions under the heading "Termination of Exemptions: Follow-up"; that Members agree, during the sectoral discussions, on a work programme under which they would eliminate all their exemptions, with the aim of completing their elimination during 2004, and not 2002 as indicated in the document; at the same time, that they agree on procedures for the notification of early elimination of exemptions, and thereafter carry out the notification provided for in paragraph 7 of the Annex; and that due respect be given to the flexibility provided for in the negotiating guidelines and procedures for developing country Members.
As for the comments by Argentina, he noted that scope existed for eliminating those exemptions for which the original rationale had ceased to exist, and added that elimination of exemptions through the review process was also important as a complement to their elimination through negotiation.
In the United States view, it was clear that MFN exemptions would be dealt with through negotiations; he wondered how Mexico saw that aspect of treating MFN exemptions, on the one hand, relate on the other hand to the proposed deadline for terminating MFN exemptions, and whether the latter would jump ahead of or mesh together with negotiations.

As to the first question posed by Venezuela, namely the reference in paragraph 5 to certain education services subsectors that may be less subject to the sensitivities relating to the divide between public policy and commercial activity than others, she noted that further on the proposal mentioned specifically Adult education services and Other education services.
Turning to the questions raised by Jordan, Japan, Korea and Turkey about the additional commitments that the United States referred to in its proposal, he said that the United States had in mind issues concerning lack of transparency and unfairness in the administration of regulation, which could be addressed as additional commitments.
The European Communities had included storage services in its list of activities on energy, contained in paragraph 6 of document S/CSS/W/60, but the same was not the case in the index contained in the United States proposal or the checklist in the proposal by Norway.
The negotiations should be flexible enough for developing countries to open fewer sectors, to liberalize fewer transactions, and to increase progressively access to their markets according to their own interests.
One specific meaning had been attached to that concept in the negotiations on basic telecommunications, namely, that unless otherwise specified in a Member’s Schedule the commitment would be considered to allow for all possible technological means available for the provision of that service.
As indicated in the United States proposal, her delegation recognized that that was an issue of concern to a number of nations in the discussion on liberalization of energy services and thought it important to consider how such differences could be addressed in the market access negotiations.
It was also important that countries expressed what the negotiations were not about, namely, that liberalization did not mean deregulation and that negotiations were not about ownership of natural resources.
As to the question by Turkey on inclusion of cabotage or maritime freight transportation, he drew attention to paragraph 52 in the proposal that stated that "In order to realize fully the benefits of efficient, competitive energy services and to make economically meaningful commitments, we need to consider the entire chain of activities involved in resource identification, production, transmission, transportation and distribution, sales and marketing, irrespective of whether the activities take place onshore or offshore".
Turning to the questions posed by the European Communities on the reasons for the scope of Canada's proposal being limited to oil and gas services, he said that the presentation of the proposal on oil and gas services by Canada was without prejudice to the right to submit other proposals on other energy services.
First, in considering the scheduling of market access commitments for markets opened to foreign competition, many of the benefits of the GATS could be accorded to energy service providers already providing services in a foreign market by clarifying where the energy services could be found within the GATS.

In the situation of an existing official monopoly, such as in certain segments of the electricity sector, market access commitments might be scheduled as follows: (1) the right to invest in an existing monopoly, which represented elimination of foreign investment restrictions; (2) to permit investment in, or operation of, a competing service supplier after a date specified in the schedule, which would be a commitment to a eliminate a cartel or existing monopoly rights; (3) where market access had been granted in some but not all energy market activities, discipline would be introduced through Article 8 for an official monopoly provider abusing its monopoly position to gain competitive advantage in a market outside the scope of its monopoly, for instance, through its control of energy distribution networks; (4) for transmission and distribution services, which were likely to function as natural monopolies, GATS commitments could be scheduled, perhaps through a reference paper, to provide access to and use of a central transmission or distribution facilities upstream and downstream, and to include making available to international competition contracts to construct, which could be a commitment under construction services, and to operate the systems, which could be a commitment under management service.
For example, with regard to services related to exploration and production, those would cover oil and gas because those activities were carried out in a manner that did not defer substantially in those two areas.
Regarding the intervention by the representative of the United States on the issue of monopoly, although further reflection on that statement was necessary, he said that when talking about the right of developing countries to regulate the supply of energy services one should bear in mind that one of the development tools used was the type of monopolies that the United States delegate had referred to.
He also suggested that work should focus on four main types of market access restrictions, namely: restrictions on commercial presence; restrictions on access to international maritime services; non-tariff measures and business practices that placed unreasonable burden on transporters and their clients; and lack of appropriate and transparent competition legislation for all three pillars and of enforcement existing legislation.
Brazil requested that, as the International Civil Aviation Organization was intensifying its efforts to obtain full adherence to the International Air Services Transit Agreement (IASTA), Norway explain what would be the value of bringing first and second freedoms within the scope of the GATS.
Argentina was open to consideration of any elements that could improve the present classification or coverage of certain activities in the air transport sector but only under the present parameters indicated by the air transport Annex.
Switzerland was considering appropriate strategies regarding ENTs, but an initial step could be to require that ENT economic criteria be further specified.
In their written communication, Australia proposed that Members (i) agree to broaden the sectoral classification of environmental services to bring the WTO classification of environmental services into line with current practice in trade in services, and to use this new sectoral classification for negotiations in environmental services; (ii) review any limitation on commercial presence with a view to eliminating barriers that could not be justified; (iii) ensure the implementation of GATS Article I:3(a), in particular that government licensing and ownership regulations at all levels, central, regional and local, were transparent and not unnecessarily restrictive.
She doubted that both exporters and importers would benefit from increased liberalisation because she failed to see how a market opening would result in a reduction of costs for developing countries since trade in this sector was dominated by large monopolies.

Finally, as general comments, he agreed that credit should be given for autonomous liberalization, based on the guidelines to be developed; and that the issue of domestic regulation should be tackled on a horizontal basis in the Working Party on Domestic Regulation.
For example, apart from emergency circumstances, there were other instances where advance publication of proposed regulations might not be desirable, including cases when regulations might be market-sensitive or cases when the commercial interests of individual institutions might be adversely affected.
He asked delegations advocating the use of the Understanding on Commitments in Financial Services how the issue of mode 1 would be resolved, since according to the Understanding only certain subsectors were supposed to be liberalized under such a mode.
Therefore, Korea believed that those prudential regulations should not impair or nullify the market access commitments already made, but there was no suggestion of adopting specific courses of action on the issue, such as a negative list approach as implied by Thailand.
There might be confusions in the interpretation of the scope of measures taken for prudential reasons, but one thing was to take those measure off the schedules, since they were covered by paragraph 2 of the Annex, and another one to affect the regulatory capacity of competent authorities.
While a sound and efficient financial sector was essential for the functioning of an economy, Kenya was hesitant to undertake further liberalization in this sector before the capacity of national regulatory bodies could be enhanced.
Academic teaching about sports could be considered as education, in New Zealand’s view, while other aspects of instruction regarding the practice or performance of a sport, including the training of coaches, could be considered as sporting services.
It also discussed a non-paper by Mauritius on "Emergency Safeguard Measures", in JOB(01)/143, and a non-paper by Venezuela on "Negotiations on Emergency Safeguard Measures: Causal Link", in JOB(01)/101/Add.
As for the structure, the symposium could start with the basic legal context for mode 4 trade, then address the economic angle and the implications of mode 4 trade on home and host countries, current policy regimes and national experiences, and present the regulators' views in the home and host country.
Therefore, the Secretariat would be proceeding accordingly, unless the delegation making the submission requested that the document be issued as unrestricted
Responding to the first issue raised by the Secretariat, the representative of Thailand wondered whether flexibility would still exist with respect to requests for technical assistance made after the mid-November deadline.

As concerned the question after paragraph 10, she said that there was not much difference between modalities and criteria; she recalled that the term "criteria" had been suggested by the group of 74 developing countries during the discussion of the negotiating guidelines, and suggested that they might be in a better position to explain if "criteria" and "modalities" were different concepts or were the same concept behind different words.
With regard to the questions which followed paragraph 35, she stressed the importance of transparency for the granting of credit but said that, as Members were still working on modalities for autonomous liberalization, it was up to individual Members to decide to whom and which measures they would be notifying and that no notification requirement was necessary in the Services Council; she added that there was no need for a collective discussion of the nature of the measures and of their value in terms of liberalization.
The representative of Uruguay said that the Secretariat paper was helpful to structure the discussion and that he could support the Chairman's suggestion that it be used as an outline for the special meeting devoted to autonomous liberalization, with the understanding that it was only illustrative and non-exhaustive.
Second, recognition and credit had to be given also by Members who had not benefitted from given autonomous liberalization measures, as such liberalization applied on an MFN basis; for example, credit could be claimed by a Member who had opened its market with respect to mode 3 even from Members who had not invested in its market.
With respect to paragraph 27, she said that Members were sailing in uncharted territory in the area of services; non-tariff measures in the goods case were the closest to the issues Members were confronted with in services trade, and she noted that no credit had been calculated with respect to the liberalization of such non-tariff measures.
Production had become more timesensitive and supply chain management involving just-in-time delivery and quality control at source had become part of local as well as international production networks.
For example, Members might wish to: identify relevant social, economic and environmental indicators, such as access to and quality of water, access to basic education, access to health services, access to telecommunications, which provided information on the broader goals described earlier; ask the Secretariat to identify information sources and collect relevant data; analyse whether the GATS had had an impact on those indicators, and particularly whether it had improved or deteriorated a Member's performance in those aspects.
She noted that work still needed to be done and that the Manual on Statistics of International Trade in Services would be available in English by the end of 2001, and hoped that it would be translated soon, as its implementation would still take time.
Regarding the sectoral classification of financial services, at the meeting held in May Japan indicated that, even though it still considered that the classification of certain activities that relied heavily on new communications technologies, such as the Internet, would merit further analysis, it had no intention of sticking to the original proposal put forward last October if, as it appeared to be the case, most Members were not interested in pursuing the discussion any further at that stage.
Some of the main themes raised were: recognition of the parameters of the Working Party’s mandate, which was contained in Article VI:4 and complemented by the Decision on Domestic Regulation; recognition of the importance of Members’ right to regulate, as confirmed by the GATS Preamble; recognition that the Working Party’s work on professional services and the creation of horizontal disciplines were not mutually exclusive, but complementary; and, lastly, acknowledgement that, until specific guidance was received by the Special Session in respect of work on domestic regulation in the context of the current negotiations, the Working Party would continue to follow its existing mandate.
Given that the proposals submitted by the delegations of Switzerland, the Republic of Korea and Chile covered a number of services sectors, the Chairman invited those delegations to briefly introduce their proposals, which would then be taken up in more detail under the relevant sectors that they addressed.
In this regard, he had noted that the United States had proposed measures to improve the access to information on laws, regulations and to enhance procedural transparency, which he supported; he also supported the European Communities proposal for improved transparency of the conditions under which service suppliers could temporarily enter and stay in Members' territory.
As for the submission by the United States, she concurred that access to information and procedural transparency were essential tools, in line with work in other fora, but said than, while these were important first steps, they were not sufficient by themselves and that more was necessary.
Second, she had noted the statement that mode 4 liberalization had predominantly been based on a horizontal approach and that the European Communities recognized some benefit to a sectoral approach based on more specific categories of skilled personnel activities, and wondered whether they were thinking of the ILO ISCO-88 and whether they had particular sectors in mind.
His delegation would be submitting a horizontal paper highlighting their interests and objectives in the negotiations, to complement the negotiating guidelines and procedures, which would reflect New Zealand's distinctive interests in the negotiations as a small, geographically isolated country which had significant trading interests in a number of services sectors.
With regard to the proposal in document S/CSS/W/49, he agreed that clear and effective trade rules, both in the WTO and domestically, would benefit domestic participants with less resources to obtain information on government regulation He sought additional clarification on the approach proposed for small and medium-sized enterprises and on how the negotiations on mutual recognition agreements would be facilitated; in particular, he wondered what role the WTO would play as opposed to individual Members.
She referred to paragraphs 20 and 21 in the submission by Japan in document S/CSS/W/42 and to paragraph 18(f) in the submission by Canada in document S/CSS/W/46 and expressed concern with regard to the references to special and differential treatment for developing countries; she said that, while least-developed countries merited priority in special and differential treatment, all developing countries should benefit from this.
28, 30); the European Communities (S/CSS/W/33, 34); Japan (S/CSS/W/42); Canada (s/css/w/52, 55, 56); Norway (S/CSS/W/59); Australia (s/css/w/62, 63, 65, 67); Switzerland (S/CSS/W/75); Chile (S/CSS/W/88)
Business services
(except for accountancy, legal services, and computer and related services)

The representative of Switzerland introduced his delegation’s proposal on professional services, stating that this sector was particularly important for Switzerland, and featured a high density of SMEs.
Regarding Canada’s question on deleting references to measures not subject to scheduling under Articles XVI and XVII, the reason was simply that the United States wanted to stress that it was looking for broad negotiations, including on scheduled measures, and wanted to encourage countries to make commitments.
Regarding the United States suggestion that express delivery services did not include services supplied in the exercise of governmental authority as defined by GATS Article I:3, he observed that GATS does not apply anyway to services supplied in the exercise of governmental authority.
He noted further that the APEC telecom working group, the ITU, CITA and OECD were all are examining aspects of the issue, but that no common understanding or consensus had yet emerged.
In view of the United States observation that it was increasingly difficult to distinguish between basic and value-added services, he asked how the United States would address the competition issues raised in paragraph 13, in which it noted concerns about basic telecom operators extending their activities into value-added services.
The representative of the United States welcomed the communications presented by Japan and Switzerland on the audiovisual sector, as well as Hong Kong, China's expression of interest in negotiating in this sector, as expressed in its September 2000 proposal on "Negotiating Guidelines".

Addressing the questions raised with respect to the communication presented by his delegation, the representative of Switzerland said that, while the mandate of the Working Party on GATS Rules was to address trade-distortive subsidies, their proposal on audiovisual services was looking for a multilateral approach to overcome the "all-or-nothing" debate.
Prohibitions on the establishment of a commercial presence by intermediaries or distributors of agricultural and textile products prevented developing countries from implementing comprehensive export strategies for products and services of interest to them, from promoting their exports adequately, from establishing alliances and networks to gain access to external markets, and from applying the capacity and know-how they had acquired in producing and exporting such products to the export of related services.
such as taxation on profit repatriation, with those which fell under other services sectors, such as lack of consumer choice in selection or postal or other delivery services, and with those which feel under domestic regulation, such as approval procedures where no information was provided on the reason for denial, and in particular whether for the latter group they were thinking in terms of additional commitments in the distribution sector or of a horizontal solution in the Working Party on Domestic Regulation.
There were possible mutual benefits for both the service-exporting Member as well as the recipient Member country, not the least of which for the latter was the potential for upgrading to, or being introduced to, other effective modes of imparting knowledge, and more importantly access to knowledge or technology which might not otherwise be conveniently available.

(h) Energy services

Communications from: the United States (s/css/w/24); Canada (s/css/w/58); Norway (s/css/w/59); the European Communities (s/css/w/60); Venezuela (s/css/w/69); Chile (S/CSS/W/88)
In introducing the proposal by his delegation, the representative of Chile said that their main interest in energy services focused on services related to the generation, transformation, transport and distribution of electrical energy.
Despite the assertions made by the European Communities in its proposal indicating their conviction as to the distinction by source of energy, the list of activities related to energy included in paragraph 6 of the European Communities proposal applied regardless of the source of energy in question.
To assist in such task Norway had proposed the establishment of a model schedule or checklist for energy services, which could also be a useful tool in assisting parties when defining what commitments they would accept in the energy sector.

(j) Environmental services

Communications from: the United States (s/css/w/25); the European Communities (s/css/w/38); Canada (s/css/w/51); Switzerland (S/CSS/W/76)
The representative of Switzerland said that environmental services occupied a special place among economic activities.
Noting that Switzerland and Canada advocated opening up markets as a way to solve environmental problems, he said that each country should be free to decide to what extent it was ready to open its market, depending in particular on its level of development.
He therefore encouraged Members to examine their schedules with a view to ensuring greater consistency between these two modes, and hoped that the Committee on Trade in Financial Services would examine the relevance of bringing these two modes of supply together in the case of financial services.
He first asked the United States representative how his country intended to use the attachment to its proposal on "Transparency and Other Principles for the Regulation of Financial Services", and whether it was planning to incorporate it as part of the Annex on Financial Services.
The level of existing commitments was high, he noted, while the most frequent barriers were restrictions on establishment of small-scale hotels and new bars and restaurants, citizenship requirements for tourist guides and for liquor licenses, etc.
On the United States proposal, he asked if the barriers listed could be tackled under a traditional market access approach, why a reference paper was necessary and what were the regulatory and competition issues concerned.

The Chairman concluded by noting that several delegations had stated that they would be circulating written questions, and urged that these be given to the Secretariat for general circulation, together with any written responses.
(m) Transport services

Communications from: the European Communities (s/css/w/41), Japan (s/css/w/42), Norway (s/css/w/59); Hong Kong, China (s/css/w/68); Switzerland (S/CSS/W/78); the Republic of Korea (S/CSS/W/87); Chile (S/CSS/W/88)
Maritime transport services

The Chairman recalled that, at the previous meeting, following a request by the delegation of the Republic of Korea, it had been agreed that the Secretariat would prepare a compilation of Members' commitments in maritime transport services, as well as update its background paper on maritime transport services (S/C/W/62).
The representative of Hong Kong, China introduced the maritime aspects of his delegation's proposal by underlining the great degree of convergence between the proposals tabled until then, in particular on the three pillars, the model scheduled and S/L/24 as a starting-point.
Services auxiliary to all modes of transport / Logistics services

The representative of Switzerland introduced his delegation's proposal by underlining the central role of auxiliary services in a modern "just in time" economy where door-to-door services had become a common practice and where the mastering of not only transport aspects, but also insurance, customs, fiscal and administrative aspects had become essential.
The Chairman concluded that the Secretariat would not be preparing any list of issues; it would only produce a report of the meeting in its usual form and it would introduce any corrections it received to the synopsis of proposals in document JOB(01)/63 and update it with respect to new proposals.
She echoed Australia's comment on the guidance to the subsidiary bodies from the Special Session; she stressed that no guidance could be drawn from the meeting, as issues had been proposed for discussion in the subsidiary bodies on which no agreement had been reached.

World Trade
Organization RESTRICTED S/CSC/W/18
17 November 1998 (98-4615) Committee on Specific Commitments

DRAFT

REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON SPECIFIC COMMITMENTS
TO THE COUNCIL FOR TRADE IN SERVICES

The Committee on Specific Commitments has held three formal meetings in1998.
The Secretariat produced detailed structural and qualitative studies of the changes brought about by the revised CPC in a number of service sectors: energy, construction, distribution, tourism, transport, research and development, real estate, rental and leasing, business services, computer and related services, professional services other business services, agricultural, mining and manufacturing services.
It agreed in particular that the outcome of this work should be published and sold to the general public in a CD-Rom format and that the elaboration of a CD-ROM version was a priority as compared to an online version.
The Chairman invited delegations to come forward with issues and questions they might wish to raise in this regard.

World Trade
Organization RESTRICTED S/CSC/M/10
15 July 1999 (99-2937) Committee on Specific Commitments

REPORT OF THE MEETING HELD ON 14 JUNE 1999

Note by the Secretariat

The Committee on Specific Commitments held its tenth meeting on 14 June 1999 under the Chairmanship of Mr.
It had been prepared at the request of the Committee and attempted to sum up the positions expressed by Members on the suggested revision of the scheduling guidelines (the suggestions are contained in document S/CSC/W/19).
On paragraph 7, his delegation supported the idea of developing an alphabetical index and attaching various sectoral guidelines, but was reluctant as to the attachment of the guidelines for MFN exemptions.
The relationship between new and old schedules should be studied, given the implications for classification and scheduling and the need to ensure that new commitments actually improved on existing commitments.

On the relationship between old and new commitments, the Secretariat noted that all new commitments had to comply with the objective, spelled out in Article XIX, of a higher level of liberalization.
Concerning paragraphs 9 and 10, the representative of Switzerland indicated that his delegation was not convinced of a proposal by Egypt which would create a fifth column, not legally binding, providing explanations for transparency purposes.
Ideally, footnotes should be merged in schedules when they related to both market access and national treatment, and headnotes if they defined scope or coverage.
On a preliminary basis, the representative of the European Communities indicated that this question was more complex than it appeared on the surface, given the existence of protocols and phased-in commitments.
It might even be necessary to include additional categories in Article XVI as the actual list did not fully capture all relevant obstacles: for instance, the requirement that clearing services might only be provided by an official body would neither fall under Article XVI nor Article XVII although it limited business opportunities.
In addition, he proposed redrafting the last but one sentence in the following manner: "Nor should they be scheduled under Article XVI as long as they do not contain a numerical limitation; a numerical limitation on the membership of professional organizations would require scheduling under Article XVI".
The example used for performance requirements would possibly fall under the proposed new category under Article XVI:2  ("measures having equivalent effect to the limitations listed under Article XVI") and did not necessarily affect national treatment.
With regard to paragraph 32, he suggested that the Secretariat drafted a paper on the distinction between modes 1 and 2 on the one hand and modes 3 and 4 on the other, and set up an illustrative list of examples.
Finally, with regard to a request by Canada for a Secretariat paper on the relationship between old and new commitments, it had been agreed that the Secretariat should give thought to the issues involved without necessarily producing a submission for the next meeting.
The Secretariat indicated that it would circulate to Members the draft schedules with an accompanying letter explaining the technical constraints of the compilation process (eg no italics, no underlining, footnotes pushed into a fifth column) as well as possible uncertainties encountered during this process.
The representatives of Canada and Hong Kong, China suggested that before any mass-mailing took place, a draft format should be circulated to Members to inform them of the basic lay-out of the electronic version.

Production on a fee or contract basis
The Chairman asked delegations to address the following issues as outlined in the Chairman’s Note for the meeting: (a) various services, that are supplied to manufacturers, are subject to the GATS and are classified or classifiable under W/120; (b) pure manufacturing should, however, not be classified as services, even if it is carried out on a fee or contract basis; (c) services incidental to manufacturing, such as drilling, should be treated on a case-by-case basis.
He also invited delegations to voice their views on how best to treat this item in the future, that is whether the general debate should continue, or whether it would be better to make a preliminary conclusion at this stage and leave questions on future work to be dealt with on a sector-by-sector basis.
From the joint reading of the CPC and ISIC it emerged that all economic activities, including manufacturing on a fee or contract basis, could be classified as services with the exception of mining and agriculture,
In sum, it would be more appropriate to address the following issues in this debate: (1) Members should consider the possibility that all manufacturing activities may actually be subject to the GATS, if performed on a fee or contract basis; (2) if there are subsidies to certain manufacturing activities, care must be taken, unless those subsidies are listed in the national schedule; (3) if a foreign investment is made in a company producing on a fee or contract basis in the manufacturing sector, relevant GATS provisions and mode 3 commitments can apply; (4) attention must be given to the MFN obligation; this obligation is applied without any commitment in the schedule; (5) tariffs imposed on goods manufactured on a fee or contract basis may restrict the cross-border supply of a service.
Some delegations questioned the view that the CPC approach to “manufacturing on a fee or contract basis” should prevail, arguing that the CPC classification was originally prepared for statistical purposes and that, although it could be used by Members for scheduling commitments, it neither constituted an agreed method of scheduling nor did it have any legal influence on the scope of application of the GATS.
This delegation, however, noted that “services incidental to mining” covered energy related as well as some non-energy related activities and that a possible improvement would be to divide this entry between “services related to the production or extraction of energy products” and “services related to the production or extraction of other products”.
The same delegation proposed that in order to clarify whether international laws with the effect of domestic laws (due to internal ratification) were excluded from the scope of FLCs’ opinions, the following sentence be added to the definition of international law: “International laws include treaties, conventions, protocols and other bilateral or multilateral agreements which have come to have the effect of domestic laws in each individual country”.
The second issue, concerning services related to recycling, prompted two questions: (a) whether recycling could be considered as a service covered by the GATS, or whether it should be considered as an act of manufacturing and, therefore, placed outside the scope of the GATS; and (b) assuming that recycling was a service, whether it should be considered as part of the environmental services sector.
Could these unbundled services be considered "new" services or should "new" services be only those which had been "invented" since the end of the Uruguay Round?
Regarding the proposal that services incidental to manufacturing be dealt with on a case-by-case basis (c), she asked whether different approaches would be developed for different sectors or whether a general approach would be developed from the analysis of various sectors and whether such case-by-case work would take place before or after the request and offer process and by which body.
In addition, such classification should distinguish between “core” energy services, which intervened directly in the energy valueadded chain and services which relate to processes, which are incidental to the valueadded chain.
Measures inconsistent with both Articles XVI and XVII
The Chairman said that his current proposal provided Members with a certain flexibility to make clear whether a limitation inscribed in the market access column was also meant to apply as a national treatment limitation.
Some delegations suggested softening the language in the Chairman’s proposal, by changing “should” into “could” or “are encouraged to” in line 2 and adding the words “for the sake of clarity” after “Members could/are encouraged to indicate” in the same line.
Illustrative list of national treatment restrictions
The Chairman recalled that at the previous meeting the delegation of the United States had proposed to fully delete attachment 1, which contained the illustrative list.
In the interim, the Chairman and the Secretariat had received a useful suggestion from the delegation of Uruguay whereby the list would be retained, provided that the chapeau was expanded by making the following three points very clear: (a) that the measures on the list came from Members' schedules; (b) that the list did not prejudge the position of any Member with regard to the interpretation of Article XVII of the GATS; (c) that the list remained of an illustrative nature and was by no means exhaustive.

He suggested the following course of action: first, to concentrate work on the problems of classification identified during the exchange of information, to ask the Secretariat to prepare an update of document Job No 5353 in order to include in it the results of the debate of the sessions of the Council held in October, November and December 1998 and finally to request the Secretariat to produce after each meeting of the Committee devoted to classification questions a compilation of the commentaries made by Members with special emphasis on the solutions or approaches suggested.
It was also agreed that the note of the Secretariat should deal with scheduling problems that were not fully addressed by the existing scheduling guidelines (such as the lack of technical feasibility or licensing requirements) and would be of an informal technical nature,
OTHER BUSINESS
The Chairman indicated it would consult on the date and agenda (notably in terms of sectors to be studied) of the next meeting.

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S/CSC/M/7 Page 1

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24 April 2001 (01-2186) Committee on Specific Commitments

REPORT OF THE MEETING HELD ON 28 NOVEMBER 2000

Note by the Secretariat

Revision

The Committee on Specific Commitments held its eighteenth meeting on 28 November 2000.
Production on a fee or contract basis
The Chairman asked delegations to address the following issues as outlined in the Chairman’s Note for the meeting: (a) various services, that are supplied to manufacturers, are subject to the GATS and are classified or classifiable under W/120; (b) pure manufacturing should, however, not be classified as services, even if it is carried out on a fee or contract basis; (c) services incidental to manufacturing, such as drilling, should be treated on a case-by-case basis.
this delegation agreed with the CPC approach, which classified as services manufacturing activities which were carried out “on a fee or contract basis”, that is to say on raw materials owned by others than the manufacturer.
Some delegations questioned the view that the CPC approach to “manufacturing on a fee or contract basis” should prevail, arguing that the CPC classification was originally prepared for statistical purposes and that, although it could be used by Members for scheduling commitments, it neither constituted an agreed method of scheduling nor did it have any legal influence on the scope of application of the GATS.
This delegation, however, noted that “services incidental to mining” covered energy related as well as some non-energy related activities and that a possible improvement would be to divide this entry between “services related to the production or extraction of energy products” and “services related to the production or extraction of other products”.
The same delegation proposed that in order to clarify whether international laws with the effect of domestic laws (due to internal ratification) were excluded from the scope of FLCs’ opinions, the following sentence be added to the definition of international law: “International laws include treaties, conventions, protocols and other bilateral or multilateral agreements which have come to have the effect of domestic laws in each individual country”.
The second issue, concerning services related to recycling, prompted two questions: (a) whether recycling could be considered as a service covered by the GATS, or whether it should be considered as an act of manufacturing and, therefore, placed outside the scope of the GATS; and (b) assuming that recycling was a service, whether it should be considered as part of the environmental services sector.
This delegation inquired whether the EC thought water distribution, collection and purification services were not in W/120 and CPC provisional at all or whether they were covered,
Postal and courier services
In his Note, the Chairman had asked delegations: (a) whether they were satisfied with the current classification, which distinguished postal services from courier services, based on whether they were operated by the national postal administration or by private operators.
One delegation pointed out that a seminar on construction services had been held by UNCTAD a few weeks earlier and that it would have been useful to its work on the classification of this sector if the Committee had acquired the acts of this seminar.
In addition, such classification should distinguish between “core” energy services, which intervened directly in the energy valueadded chain and services which relate to processes, which are incidental to the valueadded chain.
The Chairman proposed that discussions at this meeting took place on the basis of the new text by the Secretariat, which took account of the comments made by delegations on the first draft of the revised guidelines at the past meetings.
Some delegations suggested softening the language in the Chairman’s proposal, by changing “should” into “could” or “are encouraged to” in line 2 and adding the words “for the sake of clarity” after “Members could/are encouraged to indicate” in the same line.
In the interim, the Chairman and the Secretariat had received a useful suggestion from the delegation of Uruguay whereby the list would be retained, provided that the chapeau was expanded by making the following three points very clear: (a) that the measures on the list came from Members' schedules; (b) that the list did not prejudge the position of any Member with regard to the interpretation of Article XVII of the GATS; (c) that the list remained of an illustrative nature and was by no means exhaustive.
Due to time constraints, delegations could not discuss the entire text of the draft revised guidelines page by page, as originally planned.

Election of chairperson
The Chairman said that he was opening the meeting as Chairperson-designate, following the consensus in the General Council at its meeting on 15 February 2002 on the slate of names for the appointment of Chairpersons to the bodies established by the Trade Negotiations Committee.
The representative of Zambia speaking on behalf of the delegations of Cuba, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe, as well as his own, reminded Members that these delegations had submitted a paper on assessment contained in document S/CSS/W/132, and looked forward to hearing from other Members ideas that would enrich the discussion on the assessment.
Members' submissions pointed to useful elements, such as services liberalization under the GATS and national policy choices to ensure that services liberalization worked properly, the need for appropriate regulation and the importance of introducing competition and complementary policies, which were of greater significance than privatization.
He then noted that a great deal of material was available on the assessment, and that, while statistics were still unsatisfactory, improvements had been made in this area and the situation was evolving rapidly; it was therefore possible, by combining a quantitative and qualitative approach and national as well as collective assessments, to arrive at conclusions on the assessment.
in response to the Members' request, an attempt was made in this new paper to take account of the different elements of previous discussions and papers into something that could be of use in an operational sense.
Since it would be difficult to assess the value of the de facto measures – measures which are implemented in practice but not bound as specific commitments – both the measures for which credit would be granted and the credit so granted should be bound.

The Republic of Korea also agreed with Hong Kong, China on three points: (i) measures eligible for credit should be able to be scheduled under Article XVI, XVII and XVIII or lead to the elimination of MFN Exemptions; (ii) autonomous liberalization measures should be bound at the end of the negotiations to get credit; and (iii) criteria for assessing the value of autonomous liberalization measures include legal certainty, predictability, fairness and commercial value.

Regarding the relation between binding and autonomous liberalization, he said that the credit was to be granted for a benefit already gained by a country from an autonomous liberalization measure undertaken by the liberalizing Member.
He said that the rationale for Lithuania's position was to be found in the preamble to the GATS, according to which negotiations should be aimed at promoting the interests of all participants on a mutually advantageous basis and securing an overall balance of rights and obligations.
This run the risk of distracting Members and consuming an inordinate amount of time with issues that arise in a bilateral or plurilateral context in which the majority of Members might have very little interest, and which were, in any event, best resolved through bilateral or plurilateral bargaining.
The process might entail several stages: the first stage would be to inform a partner during bilateral talks, and on a voluntary basis, about autonomous liberalization measures, this could be done for instance, by means of a notification; the second stage might be the recognition by the partner of the fact that autonomous liberalization measures were undertaken; the third stage would be the presentation of a conditional offer to the partner, including the readiness to bind autonomous liberalization, either in full partially; the fourth stage was the communication of the partner's standpoint about the conditional offer-this could be done by modifying earlier requests or by making the promise to grant a credit after the measures were bound; the fifth stage would imply a decision on the binding of the autonomous liberalization measures concerned; the last stage would be to inform the rest of the GATS Members, through a notification to the Council for Trade in Services, about the binding of autonomous liberalization measures on a MFN basis.
Finally, regarding the point raised by some delegations about the potential beneficiaries of autonomous liberalization, he said that even though the text of Article XIX did not make a particular reference to developing countries in that regard, the European Communities were prepared to give a special consideration for these countries.
The representative of Hungary said that the submissions by the European Communities, Hong Kong, China, and the Secretariat all went in the same direction: to take account of and give credit for autonomous liberalization measures on the basis of multilaterally agreed criteria in the context of bilateral negotiations by providing for more optimal transparency.
Finally, regarding the organization of future work, he suggested to fold in the proposals contained in the submissions by Hong Kong, China and the European Communities into the Secretariat note, in order to use the new document as the basis for future discussions.
work of subsidiary bodies – reports by chairpersons
In keeping with what had been agreed concerning the regular reporting from the subsidiary bodies to the Special Session,
Bearing in mind what she had reported on her consultations on classification, the Committee would welcome any further guidance from the Special Session on any useful role that the Committee on Specific Commitments could play in support of the present negotiating process.
In fact, according to this view, liberalization of cross-border transactions should be limited to those services which (i) assist other economic activities and (ii) are not related to large-scale capital movements, such as financial consulting services and credit rating business.
All financial services could potentially be concerned by this form of delivery but it was especially relevant for services auxiliary to insurance and for advisory and other auxiliary financial services as defined in the classification set out in the Annex on Financial Services.
However, Australia considered that this was an important classification issue that needed careful reflection and which could be carried out in the ongoing request/offer negotiations in a manner similar to the one used for other sectors, where new classifications were proposed such as energy services, express delivery and computer and related services
The representative of Switzerland shared the point of view expressed by Australia.
One argument was that the availability of temporary foreign labour allowed governments not to address the reasons for shortages in particular areas, as in the case of nursing: the availability of foreign nurses meant that governments were not required to address the long hours and low pay which were behind many nursing shortages.
Other options involved expanding the categories of workers for which market access would be granted, either by broadening the categories of "specialists" or "others" to include more middle and lower-skilled workers, or by looking at other categories, such as "non-professional essential personnel", or training levels.
Horizontal Issues
The Chairman recalled that seven issues had been identified as "horizontal" ones: Article IV, Article VII, small and medium-sized service suppliers, MFN exemptions, transparency and other aspects of domestic regulation, classification, and, as a result of the Special Session meeting in December, economic needs tests (ENTs).
With regard to the United States explanation that the measure listed on page 40 of the Secretariat note was not an ENT because its effects were not of a quantitative nature, he wondered why it had been scheduled as a market access limitation and whether it should therefore be removed.

Accountancy Services

Turning to accountancy services, the Chairman noted that, at the previous meeting, Australia had reiterated some objectives in its proposal on accountancy (S/CSS/W/62), and had seen considerable scope for further liberalization, particularly through the elimination of citizenship and residency requirements for licencing and certification, restrictions on the form of commercial establishment, unreasonable qualification requirements and restrictions on firm names.
He recalled that it had also been suggested that the classification of legal services should be understood to include the provision of legal advice or legal representation in such capacities as counselling in business transactions, participation in the governance of business organizations, mediation, arbitration and similar non-judicial dispute resolution services, public advocacy, and lobbying.

With respect to market access and national treatment commitments, the Chairman said that proposals in this sector generally called for the elimination of restrictions on market access and national treatment for all subsectors and across all modes of supply.
He noted that it might be worth considering that how to organise a more representative classification scheme and what activities to take commitments on as two different questions: decisions or positions on the first question could be taken without prejudice to decisions on the second.

Referring to the Chairman's summary remarks on the classification of some telecommunication services as value-added services, the representative of Brazil said that these considerations might be complimented by the examination of why and how the consideration of services (such as I-internet protocol telephony) as a value-added service would be consistent with the concept of technological neutrality as discussed in the negotiations on basic telecommunications.
Other obstacles could include: restrictions on the level/percentage of foreign equity ownership; limitations on ownership of specific assets, such as real estate; limitations on the type of corporate entity that firms could establish abroad; limitations on the scope of operations; the requirement (or prohibition) to form joint ventures with local suppliers; citizenship/residency requirements.
The proposal for measures to ensure international equivalence of degrees and diplomas was very interesting and quite ambitious in scope, particularly given that paragraph 4 of the submission noted that degree granting systems and "e-learning" quality varied widely from country to country.
In introducing the submission, the representative of Cuba said that new technologies introduced over the past years had made it possible, together with an increase in trade, to bring about a certain degree of liberalization in energy services, which had been accompanied by new regulations in many developing countries.
Some pertained to national policies and regulatory regimes, which varied and were not under discussion in the negotiations, while others were considered either domestic subsidies or export subsidies, which are well categorized and covered by other disciplines in the WTO.
As a starting-point, his delegation identified seven sub-sectors which should be contained in a revised classification, including supply of water for human consumption; management of solid and hazardous waste; protection of air and climate; reestablishment and cleaning of soil and water; reduction of noise and vibrations; protection of biological diversity and landscape; and other essential services directly aimed at reducing adverse environmental impacts.

The delegate from El Salvador stated they wished to better understand the concerns of Poland with regard to not including air transport, noting that the tourism annex proposal did not really attempt to include the air transport sector, but rather to address some of the problems encountered.
While she noted that Members' positions on these issues remained divergent and that many delegations seemed to focus more on bilateral negotiations, she nevertheless felt that Members should not lose sight of their mandate, namely the importance of negotiations on horizontal rules.
No multilateral conclusions had been reached on the issue; such conclusions which would enable developing countries to assess whether the services trade liberalization under the GATS had brought them benefits and, if so, to what degree.
He had held informal consultations with those delegations who had submitted written proposals, which were very useful and had revealed the following themes: there seemed to be no need for continuing sectoral discussions of proposals in the current form; there would be a need to allocate more time for bilateral and plurilateral meetings and less time for multilateral meetings; there was a suggestion that the next cluster of meetings, scheduled for the last week of May and first week of June, be reduced to only one week.
Bearing in mind the need for flexibility, he called for bilateral meetings to be organized in such a way that the issues be up for discussion would be known in advance, to help delegations prepare adequately.
He concurred that the possibility of tabling new proposals should be left open, that the meetings of the Special Session should be shorter and that the request-offer phase would require bilateral consultations, but stressed that the ultimate purpose of the Special Session was to allow multilateral debates which would ensure transparency, homogeneity and participation of all Members.
The discussion of the item on review of progress in the negotiations revealed Members' concurrence that progress had been achieved in the negotiations, even if a few delegations were of the view that progress had not been sufficient; still, all Members agreed that a great deal of good work had been carried out.
He added that the Brussels report of the Third United Nations Conference on the Least-Developed Countries gave indications to the international community, in paragraphs 69 and 70, to assist least-developed countries' efforts to improve export promotion and marketing and to remove restrictions and enhance market access opportunities for service exports from least-developed countries, as provided for in relevant WTO Agreements in areas of export interest to them.
He also called for the links between the WTO and the Bretton Woods Institutions to be borne in mind, as well as autonomous liberalization carried out in the context of structural adjustment programmes, which cut across all sorts of important sectors such energy, financial services and insurance services.

World Trade
Organization RESTRICTED S/CSC/W/33
3 June 2002 (02-3042) Committee on Specific Commitments

INCORPORATION OF COMMITMENTS
RESULTING FROM CURRENT Services negotiations INTO
MEMBERS' GATS SCHEDULES

Note by the Secretariat

This note has been prepared in response to a request by the Committee on Specific Commitments at its meeting on 11 March 2002.
In some cases the new instrument replaced the pre-existing one ("replacement method"), while in other cases the new instrument supplemented or partially modified the pre-existing schedule ("accumulation method").
For each of the 86 Members that have made changes to their original Uruguay Round or accession schedules, the total number of documents containing commitments that are, or have been, in force varies between two and seven.
If past practice is followed, the commitments resulting from the current services negotiations will be incorporated into the GATS through a Protocol (the “Sixth Protocol”) , to which resulting schedules of specific commitments will be annexed.
The mandate for the negotiation of specific commitments is indicated in paragraph 1 of GATS Article XIX, which states that
"… Members shall enter into successive rounds of negotiations, beginning not later than five years from the date of entry into force of the WTO Agreement and periodically thereafter, with a view to achieving a progressively higher level of liberalization.
" (emphasis added)

Using almost identical language, paragraph 1 of the Guidelines and Procedures for the Negotiations states that “the negotiations shall aim to achieve progressively higher levels of liberalization of trade in services through the reduction or elimination of the adverse effects on trade in services of measures as a means of providing effective market access.
Members could, on the other hand, at the end of the negotiations decide collectively that less favourable treatment with respect to a commitment contained in the old schedule could be provided in a new schedule, and the Sixth Protocol could include language to that effect.

Accumulation of schedules
Method of incorporation
Members could choose to follow the approach used in the Third and Fourth Protocols, namely, to attach to the Sixth Protocol a new schedule for each Member containing only the changes to commitments in old schedules (the original schedule and subsequent instruments).
Thus, the goal of simplifying the incorporation of commitments by confining the subject of an initial or final offer to new or improved commitments might be hindered by the wide scope of the negotiations, and the linkages derived from the structure of the schedules.
However, to assess the overall level of commitments in the draft schedule to be attached to the Sixth Protocol with respect to the existing commitments, Members would have to compare the proposed draft schedule with relevant existing schedules.
Since the method of accumulation of schedules implies that some commitments would be left unaltered in old schedules, and not replicated in new schedules to be attached to the Sixth Protocol, the issue of preserving commitments would seem relevant only in the case of changes to existing commitments.
Such an exercise would require that the modifying Member provide a correspondence between the classifications used in its existing schedule and those used in its new one, to enable Members to verify that the actual scope of existing commitments was preserved by the classification change.

Selective departures from current classifications in certain sectors or subsectors likewise could be introduced by any Member following the same principles of preservation of scope of existing commitments, and freedom in relation to sectors or subsectors not covered by existing schedules.

Should a Member decide to depart from the classification used in its schedule (for instance reallocation of entries, further aggregation or disaggregation, or use of CPC rev.
At the end of the process, while draft schedules would be cleaned up before being attached to the Sixth Protocol, the mark-up documents would remain in the WTO document system, should it be necessary later to track down the location of a commitment.
Of course, other Members would always be in a position to verify the nature of any such changes before their entry into force in order to ensure that they are indeed technical refinements or improvements.
and replacing all earlier Members' schedules once it entered into force.
In fulfilling its mandate, the Secretariat merged all the commitments in force as of December 1999 for each Member in an electronic format suitable for a database.
The possible benefit of consolidating at the outset is that it would allow the draft consolidated schedule to be used as a working document in the presentation of offers, thereby providing the opportunity to verify all the technical aspects of the schedules throughout the negotiations up to their attachment to the Sixth Protocol.
Should the Secretariat be entrusted with preparing the draft consolidated schedule for each Member, or those that might request it, each Member would need to verify its own schedule as prepared by the Secretariat, following a procedure similar to that employed with the existing consolidated schedules.
Should Members decide to task the Secretariat with preparing a compilation of commitments in force for each Member, or for those who choose such assistance, that decision might have human resource implications that would need to be addressed.
The Working Party on Schedules recommended that “the contracting party to which the consolidated schedule relates, should be expected to accept the understanding that earlier schedules and – as has always been the case in the past - negotiating records would be considered a proper source in interpreting concessions contained in legal consolidated schedules”.

In the case of selective departures from a given classification already in use by a Member in its schedules, for existing entries it would be necessary to ensure that reallocation of a subsector (due, for example, to changes in sector or disaggregation) would not undermine the sectoral scope or the modal bindings relating to it.

Negotiations on Movement of Natural Persons
The Ministerial Decision on Negotiations on the Movement of Natural Persons adopted at Marrakesh states in paragraph 1 that "negotiations on further liberalization of movement of natural persons for the purpose of supplying services shall continue beyond the conclusion of the Uruguay Round,
The first paragraph of that Protocol states: "The commitments on Movement of Natural Persons annexed to this Protocol relating to a Member shall … replace or supplement the relevant entries on movement of natural persons in the Schedule of Specific Commitments of that Member.
" (emphasis added) The second related instrument, the Ministerial Decision on Negotiations on Maritime Transport Services, states in paragraph 1 that "Negotiations shall be entered… aiming at commitments in international shipping, auxiliary services and access to and use of port facilities, leading to the elimination of restrictions within a fixed time scale.
Paragraph 5 states: "At the conclusion of the negotiations, Members shall be free to improve, modify or withdraw any commitments made in this sector during the Uruguay Round without offering compensation, notwithstanding the provisions of Article XXI of the Agreement …" (emphasis added) As to incorporation of results, paragraph 6 states that "Any commitments resulting from the negotiations … shall be inscribed in the Schedules annexed to the General Agreement on Trade in Services and be subject to all the provisions of the Agreement.

Negotiations on Basic Telecommunications
The Ministerial Decision on Negotiations on Basic Telecommunications, which provided for extended negotiations in the sector, states in paragraph 1 that "Negotiations shall be entered …with a view to the progressive liberalization of trade in basic telecommunications".
In establishing the relationship with original Uruguay Round schedules, paragraph 1 of the Fourth Protocol states that "Upon the entry into force of this Protocol, a Schedule of Specific Commitments … concerning basic telecommunications annexed to this Protocol relating to a Member shall, in accordance with the terms specified therein, supplement or modify the Schedule of Specific Commitments …"
As in the case of movement of natural persons, this language addressed the relationship between pre-existing basic telecommunications commitments and the new commitments attached to the Protocol.
The first paragraph of that Protocol states that "A Schedule of Specific Commitments … concerning financial services annexed to this Protocol relating to a Member shall, upon the entry into force of this Protocol for that Member, replace the financial services sections of the Schedule of Specific Commitments … of that Member.
The first paragraph of this Protocol states that "A Schedule of Specific Commitments … concerning financial services annexed to this Protocol relating to a Member shall, upon the entry into force of this Protocol for that Member, replace the financial services sections of the Schedule of Specific Commitments … of that Member.
The procedure, subsequently adopted by the Council for Trade in Services in document S/L/84, consisted of a process by which Members would approve individual requests for the introduction of changes to existing schedules deemed as improvements of commitments, or changes of a purely technical character that do not alter the scope or the substance of the existing commitments.
GATS/SC TELECOM
97 FINANCIAL
97 CERTIFIED GATS/SC/#/S GATS/EL GATS/SC/#/S GATS/EL/# GATS/SC GATS/EL GATS/SC/#/S EL Albania 131 131 Angola 115 115 Antigua & Barbuda 2 S.
Congo (Zaire) 103 Zambia 93 Zimbabwe 94

__________

The term "protocol" is used to describe a legally binding international agreement that is less comprehensive than a "treaty" or "convention".
This number does not take into account MFN exemptions lists (EL/ documents) and their supplements.

Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969), Article 30, paragraphs 2 and 3, states that: "(2) When a treaty specifies that it is subject to, or that it is not to be considered as incompatible with, an earlier or later treaty, the provisions of that other treaty prevail.
(3) When all the parties to the earlier treaty are parties also to the later treaty but the earlier treaty is not terminated or suspended in operation under Article 59, the earlier treaty applies only to the extent that its provisions are compatible
with
those of the latter treaty.
4 attached to Fifth Protocol
Telecom – modified Uruguay Round Schedule
Financial – Not ratified as of April 02
Financial – Not ratified
Financial – Not ratified as of April 02
Maritime – Contains schedule that revised Uruguay Round Commitments
Financial – not attached to the Second Protocol
Financial – introduced according to paragraph 2 of S/L/9
Financial services – modified Uruguay Round Schedule
Telecom – modified Uruguay Round Schedule
Financial – rectified the schedule attached to Fifth Protocol, i.
2
Maritime- revised Uruguay Round schedule
Financial – Not ratified as of April 02
Natural Persons- supplemented entries in Uruguay Round Schedule
Telecom- supplemented entries in documents GATS/SC/31, …SC/7, …SC/33,…SC/82
Financial – replaced GATS/SC/31/Supp.
1 never in force)
Confirms Uruguay Round commitments
Maritime – integrated commitments in S/NGMTS/W/27 to the Uruguay Round Schedule
Financial – Not ratified as of April 02
Telecom- modified Uruguay Round Schedule
Maritime – confirms Uruguay Round commitments
Horizontal and Financial – modifies Uruguay Round schedule
Financial-replaced Fifth Protocol schedule
Maritime – confirms Uruguay Round commitments and adds a phrase making technical clarification
Financial – S/L/55 introduced in 95 but not attached to the Second Protocol
Financial- EL/63 introduced in Fifth Protocol
Maritime – incorporated S/NGMTS/W/4/Rev.