**<u>Table 1: Trade barriers versus trade facilitation measures</u>**

|**Trade barrier **|**Trade facilitating measure**|
|---|---|
|Labour market tests for work permits and quotas<br>on service providers|Reducing costs and processing time for business<br>visa applications|
|Nationality/citizenship/permanent<br>residency<br>requiredfor license to practice|Introducing visa on arrival|
|Foreign professionals required to retrain locally|Allowing e-visa or online visa applications|
|Membership in the professional association<br>closed to foreigners|Granting multiple-entry visas|

Source: Author’s compilation Policy is a major determinant of the costs incurred by service suppliers to contest foreign markets (Hoekman, 2016). At its most restrictive, policy can completely prohibit Mode 4 trade for e.g. by not granting visas; in other cases, policy measures can greatly reduce the scope for MNP such as through the application of economic needs tests or quotas on foreign services suppliers. Irrespective of a government’s policy stance and the concomitant regulatory measures governing market access for foreign suppliers, certain procedural and administrative requirements must always be satisfied. As is true for procedures that apply to goods crossing borders, there are costs for service suppliers in complying with regulatory policies, that go beyond fees and charges for documents or certification/conformity assessment and the time allocated to doing so. Moreover, these costs tend to increase with inadequate information/transparency regarding the applicable measures and the uncertainty associated with the actual authorization of the services provision.

Delivery of services frequently requires cross-border movement of services suppliers, both temporary and longer-term in the form of contractual service suppliers (CSSs), independent service suppliers (ISSs) and intra-corporate transferees (ICTs). In addition to excessively restrictive regulation and heterogeneity in legal requirements and practices, these service suppliers are also constrained by “red tape” associated with the implementation of domestic tax and regulatory policies. In fact, both academic research and business surveys suggest that these associated costs may be a multiple of merchandise import tariffs without generating any revenue for the government and reflect a combination of the real resources that must be allocated to meet administrative requirements and the uncertainty and unpredictability associated with border clearance processes (Hoekman, 2016).

Apropos to Mode 4 trade, most of these associated costs center around different facets of applying for a business visa – the visa fees, the number of documents required, the visa processing times – as well as the lack of predictability and certainty associated with getting the visa, which is completely at the discretion of the visa officer. Immigration authorities have unfettered discretion to assess whether a service supplier falls into the committed definitional category. There is no predictability or certainty or objective criteria on the basis of which entry can be granted. Thus, while the existing low and shallow level of GATS commitments on Mode 4 trade is a concern in itself in terms of market access, a problem also lies in the implementation of these low and shallow commitments.

An additional problem for service suppliers accessing multiple markets is the heterogeneity in regulation, the most pressing example of which is the differences in the number and types of documents required to apply for a business visa (see Section 4 for details) or differences in 4