Regional Approaches to Services Trade and Investment Liberalisation

Jane Drake-Brockman

Asia Pacific Economic Papers from Australia-Japan Research Centre, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University

Abstract: This paper addresses the question of whether the difficult issues associated with services trade and investment liberalisation are more likely to be tackled effectively in the bilateral or the multilateral context. It provides a first examination of the services trade and investment outcomes in some bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) in the Asia Pacific region, especially those centred around Singapore. The author draws the preliminary conclusion that bilateral FTAs which attempt to explore territory beyond the World Trade Organization (WTO) may well prove to be ‘WTO minus’ in terms of their impact on nascent WTO rule-making in these new areas and to have potentially negative impacts on the WTO architecture itself. The paper calls for vigilance and objective evaluation to ensure that bilateral efforts contribute in a positive way to a successful and rapid outcome to the currently troubled Doha Round of multilateral negotiations.

JEL-codes: F13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://crawford.anu.edu.au/pdf/pep/pep-337.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

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:csg:ajrcau:337

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Asia Pacific Economic Papers from Australia-Japan Research Centre, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Akira Kinefuchi ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).