Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-09-03-Speech-3-351"
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"en.20080903.26.3-351"2
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"Mr President, I am grateful to the European Parliament for this report. As it reflects, services account for the largest share of GDP in developed countries. The liberalisation of trade in services is therefore of key importance for our economic growth, as it is for developing countries, where services are not sufficiently advanced.
I largely share the views that are expressed is this report. They are in line with our global Europe strategy. It is built on an ambitious multilateral agenda and on a carefully crafted set of bilateral agreements. We are fully committed to the development dimension of the multilateral trade round and, as the report affirms, we see a multilateral deal on services as positive, both for the interests of the EU as well as for those of poorer countries.
I welcome the encouragement of the report for an ambitious level of commitments in the ongoing and upcoming negotiations for bilateral and regional agreements. We take careful note of the recommendations of the report for the different ongoing negotiations that generally touch upon the sectors that our services industry considers of importance.
Allow me to make a general reflection on the negotiation of services agreements which is applicable to both bilateral and multilateral deals. There is no easy fix for negotiations in services, no simple formula that can apply across all service sectors and all countries. These negotiations involve addressing the complex and often detailed set of regulatory frameworks of countries in areas as diverse as those reflected in the last section of your report – from financial services to health care or education. We ought to do that in a non-intrusive way that preserves the right of third countries to regulate the different services sectors domestically as they wish, while opening them to external supply if competition is favoured. There should be no discrimination.
We acknowledge that some services sectors account for a larger share of GDP than others and that, to this extent, the liberalisation of their trade may have a larger impact on our overall welfare. However, in prioritising any given sectors, we also have to take into consideration, amongst other factors, the relative specialisation of our EU countries and regions in different sectors.
Finally, let me offer a reflection on the multilateral process. Your report welcomes the announcement of a signalling conference on services as part of the DDA ministerial negotiations. We actually pushed very hard for this event, which took place in July in Geneva. It was a relative success. We did not hear all the signals that we would have liked, but we heard enough to say that WTO members and several of our target countries understood the importance that we attach to a satisfactory market access outcome in the services sector.
I have no crystal ball to see where the multilateral talks in the DDA will go from where we left them in July. We are in the situation where one issue – the special safeguard mechanism in agriculture for developing countries – has provided the proximate cause of breakdown, even if there are other issues that also need to be resolved. So support for the outline modalities deal as a whole is very fragile and not just a question of the US and India resolving their differences in agriculture. I feel as if we have a priceless, wafer-thin vase of great craftsmanship in our hands, but which now has to be carried from here over a very slippery floor. One false move and the whole thing could crash into many pieces. So we need to be careful of the moves we make. We cannot stand still but, equally, it is difficult to move forward.
We stand ready to re-engage at whatever level is useful to make sure that we do not lose what we had achieved and which remains on the table. But there has to be genuine political commitment by others to participate in a negotiating process. In this context, the progress made at the Services Signalling Conference will not be lost. The signals made threw some light on the flexibilities that our key trading partners have in the services field, and this is precious information.
The best contribution that we can all make in the current circumstances of the breakdown in negotiations in Geneva is to be realistically positive and explain how big an opportunity we may miss if we fail altogether. Your report, therefore, is timely, for it sends a clear and balanced message on the importance that the liberalisation of trade in one of the key areas of a DDA deal – services – would have, both for us and for our partners. I look forward to continuing my cooperation and dialogue with Parliament, both in this area and other areas of trade policy."@en1
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