The financial crisis in Europe in the early nineties, followed by the Mexican crisis in the mid- nineties and the Asian financial crisis in the late nineties have underlined the deeper globalisation taking place in the financial services sector, and indeed on the services front. I have spoken on the impact of globalisation on the services industry on many occasions. Let me concentrate today on its impact on the trade in goods and its bearing on the next trade round of negotiations at the World Trade Organisation. Nowadays in the production of goods globalisation has made multi-country manufacturing the norm. Products are much less likely to be wholly manufactured in one jurisdiction and much more likely to come from multiple sources.
Production is no longer purely a domestic concern of one single country.
As production is increasingly dispersed over multiple individual economies, it becomes increasingly difficult to refer to the place of production of a product. In the absence of market access barriers like quotas and other protectionist trade instruments like anti-dumping, the relevance of rules of origin will vanish and international trade will no longer be distorted by artificial trading regimes. In a truly liberalized global trading economy, the origin, or origins, of a product will no longer be meaningful or of concern. Rules of origin are only relevant when there is some sort of discriminatory treatment based upon origin. Only in a world with trade barriers does it matter where a product is manufactured.