The Doha Development Agenda Sample Clauses

The Doha Development Agenda. The Uruguay Round marked only a first step in a longer-term process of services liberalization within a multilateral framework. The importance of the Round lay less in its improving actual market conditions, but in creating a completely new system of rules and disciplines for future trade liberalization. This may also explain why the GATS, in Article XIX:1, already provides for a new round of services negotiations to start not later than five years from the date of entry into force of the Agreement. Consequently, a new services Round was launched in January 2000. It aims to achieve a progressively higher level of liberalization of services trade while “promoting the interests of all participants on a mutually advantageous basis and … securing an overall balance of rights and obligations” (Article XIX:1). Although the Seattle Ministerial Conference in late November 1999 failed to agree on launching a larger trade round, the mandate to negotiate on services was never put into doubt. Contrasting from preparatory stages of the Uruguay Round, Members’ focus was no longer on whether, but on how to promote services liberalization within the multilateral system. As a first step in 1998, and as part of an information exchange programme mandated at the Singapore Ministerial Conference, the WTO Secretariat prepared a series of background papers on major services sectors (available on the WTO Website) to stimulate policy discussion and promote dissemination of relevant information among Members. In March 2001, the Council for Trade in Services adopted Guidelines and Procedures for the Services Negotiations (document S/L/93) as provided for in Article XIX:3. Major elements include a reaffirmation of the right to regulate and to introduce new regulations on the supply of services; the objective of increasing participation of developing countries in services trade; and the preservation of the existing structure and principles of the GATS, including the listing of sectors in which commitments are made and the four modes of supply. Certain new elements have been added, such as explicit recognition of the needs of small and medium- sized service suppliers; reference to the request-offer approach as the main method of negotiation; and continuation of the assessment of trade in services, mandated under Article XIX:3, as an ongoing activity of the Council for Trade in Services. The Negotiating Guidelines further provide that the rule-making negotiations inherited from the Urug...