As outlined in van der Marel and Shepherd (2019), a first attempt to conceptualize TFiS in general was made during a conference organized by the World Bank in New Delhi in March 2017 in collaboration with the Government of India. Some of the extensive discussions held at this conference are also useful in helping us frame the concept of TFiS as it applies to Mode 4 trade.

One key take-away from the discussion was the need for TFiS measures to be pragmatic in nature i.e. the need for domestic regulation to be implemented in a manner that minimizes costs for service suppliers, and preferably be aligned with domestic regulation in other countries to further minimize costs of regulatory heterogeneity. In the context of Mode 4 trade for instance, while the objective of negotiating visa requirements for MNP is unlikely to eliminate them completely (differentiating from the case of quotas for service suppliers), the aim would instead be to formulate visa requirements in a manner that imposes minimum administrative and compliance costs on service suppliers.

The concept of meaningful transparency was also emphasized in these deliberations in discussing TFiS more generally. Thus, it is not just important that the procedures for a business visa application are well laid out and easily accessible to all potential applicants, but the entire process of getting a visa should be transparent and predictable in terms of visa processing times, objectivity in the decision to grant a visa, complete disclosure of information in the event of the rejection of a visa application, and real recourse to a decision-challenging mechanism without fear of adverse consequences in subsequent visa applications. All such measures would facilitate business visa applications enormously. In fact, frequent service suppliers could also be invited to participate in the development of future rules and procedures through consultation meetings, thereby enabling them to influence outcomes and leading to effective transparency or effective market access (van der Marel and Shepherd, 2019).

In sum, the measures that would fall within an MNP TFiS agenda would be “(a) regulatory in nature..., targeting the operations of the services business as opposed to market entry across the board, and (b) go beyond the mere fact of transparency by effectively operationalizing it and by allowing stakeholders to obtain meaningful outcomes. One additional element in this respect is how regulatory procedures are mapped so that deficiencies can be prevented in the preparation, adoption and application of regulations (Molinuevo and Sáez, 2014). If the procedures for regulatory adoption and implementation are secured, it enhances the likelihood that policy makers improve the quality of the regulation and avoid any arbitrary modification of the administrative practise afterwards.” (van der Marel and Shepherd, 2019, op. cit.)

# **3. Regulatory barriers to Mode 4 trade**

In this section, we undertake an analysis of measures that seem excessively restrictive in their regulatory role as applicable to MNP and thus primarily constitute barriers to Mode 4 trade. The data on these Mode 4 measures, publicly available online, have been put together by the OECD for 45 countries as a part of their STRI database. These data include 27 measures (across 29 sectors and sub-sectors) of which 24 measures entail a Yes/No answer and the remaining three<sup>3</sup> measures include quantitative information. The information is available for the years 2014 to 2017, but given the coverage of issues and the non-variability in responses over time,

> 3 These pertain to limitations on duration of stay for (i) contractual service suppliers (CSSs); (ii) independent service suppliers (ISSs); and (iii) intra-corporate transferees (ICTs).

6