relatively well-covered by GATS commitments<sup>55</sup> . In “Accounting, auditing and bookkeeping” and “Data processing”, for example, only 70 and 69 Members, respectively, have made commitments. In accounting the majority of the 70 Members enters some limitations to free market access and national treatment, while in data processing only around two-thirds of these commitments guarantee unrestricted market access. In other sectors that can be subject to electronic transactions (audiovisual, education, health, education, recreation, etc.) the number of commitments is even more limited. Audiovisual services has received only 19 whereas adult education has received 31 commitments.

The scheduled limitations to the cross-border supply do not vary much across sectors and are few enough to be enumerated. Specifically, nationality, residency, commercial presence, authorization, licensing and local authentication requirements constitute the majority of cross-border service trade barriers<sup>56</sup> . These limitations aim to heavily restrict, if not outright prohibit, the cross-border supply of services. Few quantitative market access limitations have been entered but a significant amount of national treatment limitations exist on cross-border supply. Annex Table 1 lists some of these restrictions.

If we focus on the support and BPO services that developing countries are supplying, the picture is hardly more positive. The lack of a proper classification scheme that would allow GATS Members to schedule comprehensive commitments on BPO services is only part of the story. Annex Table 2 presents the state of commitments on a patchwork of existing W/120 entries that correspond to some of the BPO services. Whereas for instance, the most liberal GATS schedules almost always include full commitments on data processing, they offer surprisingly little in some of the categories that are likely to be the most important ones to guarantee full market access for BPO and support services (“Supply services of office support personnel, Telephone answering services, Other business services n.e.c.”).

Table 3 concentrates on a few industrialized and large developing countries. It is striking that the few opportunities to at least use the limited W/120 and the underlying provisional CPC to schedule broadly with respect to business support services were not taken even in the most liberal GATS schedules<sup>57</sup> . Even more worrying is the fact that the ongoing GATS negotiations have – so far - not yet been used to go further in this respect. By June 2003 around one-third of the WTO Members had extended initial requests to some of their fellow trade partners<sup>58</sup> . By January 2004 initial offers have been presented by some 40 Members<sup>59</sup> . Column 3 of Table 3 assesses the few initial and publicly available services offers (namely, Australia, Canada, EC, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, U.S. and Switzerland). It emerges that these Members (exclusively industrialized countries) did – with two minor exceptions - not improve their GATS schedule for the items under consideration. In fact, only Canada has nearly full commitments in all three relevant categories.

> 55  Computer and Related Services, WTO Document S/C/W/45 14 July 1998 56

> OECD (2000), p. 6 ff. Thanks goes to Rachel Thompson for this extremely comprehensive work. 57  The exception to the rule is the Canadian GATS schedule.

> 58

> Noted by Bridges “Only Few Services Offers Trickle in By End-March Deadline”, in: Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest, Vol. 7, No. 12, April 2, 2003. 59  Argentina, Australia; Bahrain; Bolivia, Canada; China, Chile, Chinese Taipei; Colombia, Czech Republic; European Communities and its Member States; Fiji Islands; Guatemala, Hong Kong, China; Iceland; Israel; Japan; Republic of Korea; Liechtenstein; Macao; China; Mexico; New Zealand; Norway; Panama; Paraguay; Poland; Slovenia; St Christopher and Nevis; Senegal, Singapore, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Sri Lanka, Switzerland; Thailand, Turkey, United States and Uruguay.

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