It consisted of five items: negotiations on safeguards under Article X of the GATS; negotiations on subsidies under Article XV of the GATS; negotiations on government procurement under Article XIII of the GATS; date of the next meeting of the Working Party; and other business.
ITEM A: NEGOTIATIONS ON SAFEGUARDS UNDER ARTICLE X OF GATS

The Chairperson noted that since the previous meeting, one more submission on the subject of emergency safeguard measures had been received from Peru (S/WPGR/W/23), as well as a response to the questionnaire from Cuba (S/WPGR/W/15/Add.
In particular, how injury would be determined, and how a causal link would be established between injury and increased services imports given the paucity of data, were identified by some delegations as key questions.
First, a Member might need to use measures with a real impact on imports over a short period of time, and so the quantitative restrictions listed in Article XVI may be more efficient.

Several delegations felt that the issue of how far policy objectives should be built ex ante into the schedules, and how much scope there should be for ex post safeguard action needed to be carefully considered (discussed in Section V of S/WPGR/W/24).
Another delegation said that Members should be cautious about the idea of scheduled safeguards since a situation could be created in which the possibility to respond to unforeseen circumstances, which were a priori the same for everybody, would be available to certain countries and not to others.
ITEM B: NEGOTIATIONS ON SUBSIDIES UNDER ARTICLE XV OF GATS

The Chairperson indicated that only two responses to the questionnaire on subsidies had so far been received, from Norway and New Zealand, circulated as documents S/WPGR/W/16/Add.
The next step would be to examine what entities would be covered, an issue for which Article I of the GATS would be relevant.
Another delegation suggested that it would be appropriate to address the principle of non-discrimination, and emphasized the importance of clarifying how the work of the Working Party would relate to ongoing work on procurement in other WTO fora.