Assessing the Benefits to Developing Countries of Liberalisation in Services Trade

摘要

This paper both discusses the potential impacts of services trade liberalisation on developing countries and reviews existing quantitative studies. Its purpose is to distill themes from studies rather than to advocate policy change. The picture that emerges is seemingly one of valiant attempts to quantify in the presence of formidable analytical and data problems. The basic intuition seems to be that with genuine two-sided (OECDon-OECD) liberalisation in services that are seemingly considerably labour intensive, the potential may be there for significant developing country gains. This position is seemingly not endorsed by studies, neither is it contradicted. One difficulty with existing studies is that the conceptual underpinnings of trade in services and how analytically this trade differs from trade in goods, if at all, needs to be sorted out before impacts on developing countries are discussed. Key here are mobility issues for service providers (both firms and workers), and the functional treatment of individual service items (banking, insurance, telecoms, etc.). Recent analytical work suggests that liberalisation in these service items need not always yield gains. The discussion and measurement of barriers to service trade is also problematic. One is talking of domestic regulation, entry barriers, portability of providers and competition policy regimes, more so than barriers at national borders as with tariffs. Both representing and quantifying barriers raise major difficulties, and these are spelled out.