- Staff professional skills must be improved so that Vietcombank (and other banks) will be both a currency trader and an investor, thus helping commercial enterprises to develop. The growth of these enterprises should become a foundation for banking development.

Exploring the case of China, Bhattasali (2004) similarly observed that the reform of the financial sector in the context of WTO accession primarily served domestic objectives: i.e. to increase competition, performance, and the range of financial products available to locals. Before accession, foreign banks operated almost exclusively on an offshore or enclave basis and accounted for less than 3 percent of bank assets. The accession protocol provided for liberalization within two years of local currency services to Chinese enterprises (five years for services to individuals), followed by the liberalization of stock-broking, fund management, and insurance on quite short timetables. The author concluded that state banks would come under serious pressures from their non-performing loans, weak management systems, low operating margins, and the emerging strong competition. Financial re-engineering and fairly radical actions to reduce operating costs would be required. The author remained optimistic, however, that suitable reforms could be adopted and that the rehabilitation of the state banks would not present major problems.

**Source:** Van Sam and Thanh Thu (2005), Bhattasali (2004).

# _Other types of adjustments_

Adjustment to WTO accession requirements is always a source of economic, social and political stress, because it directly affects people’s income and conditions of living. It also reaches far beyond the economic sphere: cultural factors, for example, can profoundly affect a country’s ability to make (or implement) certain accession commitments. In some cases, exceptions can be carved out of the accession protocol; otherwise, the accession could be delayed or denied. Intellectual property is the most common area of cultural frictions, but it is not the only one.

The effective implementation of the TRIPS Agreement requires the adoption of a number of rules and the reinforcement of certain administrative capacities (e.g. register for geographical indications, enforcement mechanisms, see Abbot and Correa, 2007). Cultural factors also enter into consideration, as countries try to qualify their commitments with local interpretation of the rules. For example, in the case of Vietnam, patent owners were expected to use the invention in conformity with the requirements of the socio-economic development of the country, and the public could claim for annulment of the protection certificate (Langhammer and Lücke, 1999). In the case of Nepal, as already mentioned, the country refused to join the UPOV treaty as well as other WIPO conventions (Rajkamikar, 2005). Some authors also fear that the level of intellectual property protection imposed by the TRIPS Agreement may be excessive for some acceding countries, inhibiting e.g. technological transfers. Moreover, according to Maskus (2004), adjustments required from intellectual property commitments would include the development of a stronger competition policy regime and larger allocation of resources to research and development.

In the case of Vanuatu (Gay, 2005), the issue was not one of intellectual property, but land ownership. For customary and traditional reasons, Vanuatu constitution prohibits freehold ownership of land. Incumbent WTO members asked for the revision these laws, but this would have been politically controversial and culturally unacceptable to Vanuatu. The latter negotiators could not compromise on this issue, and had to make major commitments on goods and services market access in compensation. The resulting “high price” of accession for Vanuatu then accounted among the factors that were responsible for the decision to suspend accession. In the case of Saudi Arabia, Bhala (2007) pointed at the compatibility problem of certain WTO obligations with Islamic law, and _vice versa_ .

_Special and differential treatment, technical assistance and capacity building_

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