Financial services and the World Trade Organization - liberalization commitments of the developing and transition economies

No 2184, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: The author analyzes the results of the financial services negotiations under the World Trade Organization's General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). He shows that the negotiations have contributed to more stable and transparent policy regimes in many developing and transition economies and that the commitments in no way compromise the countries'ability to pursue sound macroeconomic and regulatory policies. But even though the number of countries that participated in the eventual agreement was impressive, the liberalizing content of commitments was in many cases quite limited. Numerical estimates suggest that in general the African and Eastern European participants made much more liberal commitments than the Asian and Latin American participants. On the whole, the outcome probably reflects how each participant balances the benefit of unilateral commitments against the benefit of retaining bargaining chips for future multi-sectoral negotiations. Two aspects of the outcome cause concern: 1) There has been less emphasis on introducing competition by allowing new entry than on allowing (or maintaining) foreign equity participation and protecting the position of incumbents. 2) Where it was deemed infeasible to introduce competition immediately, participants have taken little advantage of the GATS to lend credibility to liberalization programs by pre-committing to future market access.

Keywords: Public Sector Economics&Finance; Payment Systems&Infrastructure; Banks&Banking Reform; Financial Intermediation; Environmental Economics&Policies; Trade and Services; Banks&Banking Reform; Environmental Economics&Policies; Public Sector Economics&Finance; Health Economics&Finance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999-09-30
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSC ... d/PDF/multi_page.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:2184

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().