TiSA jako nowe plurilateralne porozumienie w sprawie handlu usługami

Magdalena Myszkowska

Abstract

Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) is the largest in terms of the number of members trade agreement being negotiated at present. Its objective is to increase the dynamics of liberalization processes of international trade in services as well as to release a massive potential of this sector, moving beyond the previous (often outdated) provisions of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). Political and economic implications of TiSA are widely discussed on account of its potentially significant impact on global trade in services. However, the basic goal of the article was to present plurilateral TiSA in the multilateral context of trade system. The method of critical analysis of sources was applied for its realization – both the official EU and WTO documents as well as scientific literature and press releases. The elaboration consists of three basic parts. The initial part contains an analysis of some key elements and the structure of future agreement while the subsequent parts include certain reasons behind the prolonged stagnation of service negotiations conducted under the auspices of the World Trade Organization. Subsequently, the possibility of including TiSA as a common set of rules in the scope of trade in services into a multilateral trade system and thus, expanding the benefits stemming from it onto countries not participating in the negotiations, was analysed. Based on the limited information about the status of ongoing negotiations one may note that the longer the time of conducted discussions in the present format, the less justified multilateralization of the agreement and the weaker perspectives for its inclusion into WTO structure. It is worth noting that neither the key emerging economies nor strategically significant ASEAN countries participate in negotiations. Hence, there is a clear need for engagement of greater number of parties to the negotiations in order to reach the indispensable “critical mass”. Also the hybrid model of formulating commitments liberalising the exchange of services may become an obstacle on the way of any potential future of TiSA multilateralization; the more distant the architecture of new agreement is from the negotiation procedures accepted in GATS, the harder it will be to include it into WTO. The work constitutes a contribution for further research on the real significance of TiSA in enhancing liberalization of trade in services.