?Plurilateral Request-Offer? Approach in GATS Draft Text: Entry Point for Dangerous Sectoral Negotiations

Misleading Language in the Draft Ministerial

There is ambiguity in the current draft Ministerial text on GATS. Parts of the text have been drafted in a deliberately subtle manner to make it unclear whether or not there will be sectoral negotiations that will commence in GATS negotiations post-Hong Kong, such as those that took place in Telecommunications and Financial Services in 1997.

In Geneva, the main fights between the developed countries and the majority of developing countries in the past weeks at the WTO have been over the issue of numerical targets