This means that they have a proportionately larger stake in a healthy growing world economy than do industrial countries. Against this background, the development of innovative tools for use in GATS negotiations has been an underlying objective of the OECD Trade Committee's project on the assessment of barriers to trade in services. An OECD paper available on Internet provides an overview of the concept of using formula approaches in the negotiation 2 under GATS of specific commitments for scheduled sectors, in conjunction with more conventional request-offer approaches. The paper shows how formula approaches apply to services in the context of the negotiations, what the practical benefits are likely to be, and how to ensure balance and flexibility in the application of such approaches while yielding commercially meaningful results. The paper considers the benefit to developing countries of a formula approach that provides an opportunity to shape a package of market access commitments into which particular interests of developing countries are integrated from the outset.
Tariffs also promise to figure prominently in talks charting the way to further liberalisation.
Achievements and Outlook provides a wealth of empirical data to underpin such discussions. Some of the study's major findings include evidence that tariff peaks continue to affect a number of sectors, both in industry and agriculture, although the number of tariff lines with peaks in agriculture is generally higher than that found in industry. In OECD countries, high industrial peaks are found in such sectors as textiles, clothing, footwear and motor vehicles. Even in the case of countries that did not introduce tariff rate quotas, the tariffication exercise still resulted in high agricultural tariffs. Bound mean tariffs were found still to exhibit wide-ranging variations, both across countries and across sectors within any single country.