To assess the schedules, sectoral commitments of GATS Members were scaled by Hoekman (1995) with a view to 'quantifying' two things: (1) the extent to which measures have been _bound;_ and (2) the share of sectors where the binding relates to 'free trade' (defined as the absence of market access restrictions or limitations on national treatment). Each GATS Member's specific commitments was entered into a spreadsheet (commitments made as of April 1994 were considered in this exercise). Two country groups were created for comparison purposes, one for 79 'developing countries', and one for 18 high income countries ('HIC'). The 'developing country' group includes countries with a wide range of per capita incomes and substantial variation in service market size (GDP). Because of their relatively low per capita incomes this group includes a number of East European transition economies-the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Slovak Republic. Among the Arab countries, the following had submitted offers by April 1994: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Morocco and Tunisia. It is worth noting that currently there are accession working parties to the GATT and/or the WTO for Algeria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. I/ Commitments were classified into three categories: (1) 'None', implying no restrictions are applied on _either_ market access or national treatment for a given mode of supply/sector; (2) 'Unbound', meaning no policies are bound for a given mode of supply/sector; and (3) 'Other', which in practice implies that a sector is scheduled but that restrictions are listed. To allow calculation of the sectoral coverage of commitments, one of three numerical indicators (weights) was allocated to each of the 'cells' of a Member's schedule: a '1' in all instances where 'None' was stated in the schedule for a sector/mode of supply (i.e., full market access/national treatment is provided); a zero in all instances where Member's list 'Unbound' for a sector/mode of supply; and 0.5 in all instances where specific restrictions or limitations are listed for a sector/mode of supply. The value of these indicators were chosen so as to allow aggregation across sectors and countries. The higher the number, the greater the implied extent of openness-cum-binding.2/ Scaling commitments of 'unbound' as zero, and commitments where measures violating national treatment or market access were listed as 0.5 reflects a perception that scheduling and binding has value, no matter how restrictive the policies that are maintained. The value of 0.5 is arbitrary, and serves simply to distinguish commitments from the other two categories.

Market access (MA) and national treatment (NT) coverage ratios are reported in Table 6. Three indicators were calculated. First, the number of sector/mode of supply combinations (cells) where a commitment was made. Second, the 'average coverage' of the schedule defined as the arithmetic mean of the scale factors allocated to each cell (0 for 'unbound', 0.5 for bound restrictions, and 1 for 'no restrictions'). Third, the share of 'no restriction' commitments in (1) a Members total commitments ('count'); and (2) relative to the 155 possible sectors of the GATS classification list. The higher the number, the more 'liberal' the country.

'HIC' members made commitments of some kind for 47.3 percent of the GATS list, as compared to 11.2-19.7 percent for developing country groups, depending on their per capita income level. Commitments made by large developing countries, arbitrarily defined as those with GDP of US $40 billion or more, were substantially higher than the developing country average, accounting for 38.6 j/ Qatar and the United Arab Emirates submitted schedules in 1995 and are not included in the analysis. 2/ A value of 1 for a sector/mode of supply does not necessarily imply that foreign service providers can freely contest a specific market through a given mode of supply. This depends on the applicable horizontal commitments. In all cases where a reference is made under the temporary entry mode of supply to a horizontal commitment (restriction), a value of 0.5 was entered.

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