|
Please note, this part of the site has not been updated for a VERY long time... Welcome! We were going to have a lavish website waiting for you, but owing to a general lack of time we have been forced to scale this down to a single, information-packed page. A full website with bells and whistles will appear in due course, but hopefully the information contained within this page will whet your appetite and convince you of the seriousness of the issues surrounding GATS (General Agreement on Trade In Services.) We'll say a little bit about GATS and the national/international context - it's hard to avoid this, really - and then focus on the consequences for localities such as Warwickshire. (Please note that the rigorous, technical backbone to support our arguments is in place, but given the aforementioned time constraints they do not, except in a few instances, appear here.) So what's this GATS thing then? GATS is an international trade agreement designed to encourage and facilitate international trade in services. It is one of the 28 agreements that the World Trade Organisation (henceforth referred to as the WTO) oversees. In his letter to the Leamington Courier on October 19th, Philip Bushill-Matthews got confused between GATT and GATS; GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) was the 'predecessor' to the WTO. The WTO, however, is much more than a highly evolved GATT; it is in fact an insitution (with a secretariat, headquarters and so on) with jurisdiction in areas GATT never touched. Services is one of these areas, and GATS is the agreement that deals with them; GATS came into force at the same time as the creation of the WTO, in 1994/5. Whereas GATT and many of the other WTO agreements are designed to pursue the liberalisation of trade international trade in goods, GATS is designed to pursue the liberalisation of international trade in services. What is "liberalisation"? Essentially, it is the removal of "protectionist" barriers to trade i.e. policy mechanisms that give advantage to your own industries and/or make it harder for foreign companies to market in your country. Classic "protectionist" mechanisms on goods are border tariffs, taxes, quotas on foreign goods coming into your country, and export subsidies for your industries exporting goods out of your country. Clearly, though, the "protectionist" measurers that (say) might make it hard for a foreign company to sell their cars in this country are very different to the measures that might make it hard for a foreign private healthcare provider to sell health services in the UK. This fundamental difference between international trade in goods and services is why services has its very own agreement, GATS. In both cases, the underpinning ideology is the same:- that making trade between nations as "free" as possible, interrupted by as few protectionist barriers as possible, is the best economic system for everybody. In services, this translates as the argument that foreign service providers should be allowed into other countries' markets so they can compete "fairly" with the native service providers, which may or may not be the state. (For example, a US healthcare corporation competing, in the UK, with our state-delivered healthcare system.) And what's wrong with that? There are problems at various levels, but to appreciate the overarching problem one must consider what a government must do to "liberalise" one of its service sectors. At present the barriers to foreign service providers operating in this country - and this is true in countries generally - are regulatory and legislative barriers, as opposed to the border tariffs, quotas etc. used to block the flow of international trade in goods. For example, the US has noted (in numerous service sectors) that legislation requiring foreign companies to hire a minimum percentage of local staff is an obstacle to fluid international trade in that service. Thus, the liberalisation of a service sector often goes hand in hand with extensive deregulation in that sector. Basically, the fewer rules there are, the less onerous foreign companies will find moving into a local market. The WTO is fairly schizophrenic about this; when addressing the concerns of GATS critics, the WTO argues GATS is nothing to do with deregulation, yet in less public situations they laud the deregulatory possibilities of GATS. You may ask, "What's wrong with deregulation?" Well, to answer this you have to ask yourself whether companies can always be trusted to serve the public interest if they are left unregulated or lightly regulated. Most people appreciate that the most profitable route for a company is not always the route that serves people the best, so some regulatory mechanisms are needed to prevent companies maximising profits at the expense of wider society. So the liberalising of services naturally entails some degree of deregulation (or pro-competitive regulation), and this is the crux of the argument: can companies, left to their own devices, be entrusted with fundamental services like health, education and so on? Following on from that, does GATS get the balance right, or is it weighted far too much in favour of deregulation? The WTO, of course, thinks GATS is great; the WTO GATS website is here. An increasing number of international development groups, citizens groups, environmental groups, public service unions, public service workers and so on believe GATS is biased too much in favour of deregulation. They argue more strongly and specifically than that. They argue that GATS is designed in such a way as to demolish public services, environmental regulation, public interest regulation etc. so that massive service corporations can move into the market and maximise profits by basically doing what the hell they like. This is the view taken by WarwickshireGATS. Over the next few weeks and months this website will expand to articulate this properly. In the meantime, you might like to have links to just a few of the organisations, institutions and people that are rallying against GATS. (Note that some of these links are a bit out of date now, although the anti-GATS support base is getting bigger all the time! We'll update these links when we get time. If you're organisation isn't listed, it may be linked to via sites such as GATSWatch, for example. Maybe your (local) organisation has yet to act? If so, drop us a line and we'll try and help out!)
So what's this got to do with local services, local government, and Warwickshire To get a quick overview, check out this letter which was mailed from WarwickshireGATS to many Councillors on Warwickshire County Council. Other sources of information as to how GATS will affect local services are the Local Government Information Unit report (above), and the GATS Municipal Kit, an exclellent analysis by a Canadian group. (Canada are at the forefront of localised anti-GATS actions; the confederation of municipalities are demanding their national government exempt them from GATS.) This is the major problem with GATS as far as local communities are concerned: GATS affects all levels of goverment. GATS committments made by the UK (actually, the EU, who negotiates on our authority) are binding all the way down to the grassroots. The government and the EU say there's nothing to worry about, because why would they expose our services to attack from GATS? Yet EU GATS commitments made in earlier years in areas such as environmental services, tourism, hotels and restaurants are as liberalising and deregulating as they get. We are currently studying the ramifications of these existing GATS commitments on local communities but it doesn't look good. When applied enthusiastically (as the EU has done in those services) the types of activities which are banned under GATS are amazing. No limit on the number of operators. No cap on their economic activity. No requirement that foreign service providers employ a certain proportion of local staff, use a certain proportion of local materials, or have a certain proportion of local shareholders. No subjecting companies to an economic needs test. No mandated technology transfer. The list goes on. Scarily, GATS goes even further than other international trade agreements, which usually try and eliminate any measures that are "discriminatory" against foreign companies. The above list applies irrespective of whether foreign companies are involved, so this is tantamount to restructuring internal laws! In addition, subsidies for local companies (even for development and regeneration purposes) in those sectors are banned or have to be offered to foreign competitors. Any legislation which directly, or even indirectly causes an obstacle to foreign service providers is not allowed. This is all alarming in the extreme; if you place small, local service providers in the same market as huge transnational service providers, and strip away any support for the small service providers, the transnational service provider will just wipe them out with their economic muscle. This, GATS critics think, is what GATS is really meant for:- to eliminate any measures that might allow local, native service industries to compete and/or survive against massive, service-exporting multinationals. In addition, governments (local and national) lose the ability to cultivate localised, sustainable service industries, since this notion of community/national development from the grassroots up is fundamentally against the GATS goal of a single, global service marketplace. Given the nature of the WTO, any disputes over whether a government (local or national) are violating GATS disciplines are handled by a small WTO Dispute Resolution Panel in Geneva. Should this "jury of trade bureaucrats" find the nation guilty, they either have to remove the offending regulation or face the prospect of crippling economic sanctions. It is entirely possible that a hugely influential service corporation will notice that regulation specific and common to local governments in the UK diminishes their profitability, and convince their parent nation to file a complaint at the WTO. The absurdity of local, common-sense legislation being challenged, tried and possibly struck down by a handful of bureaucrats in Geneva is alarming and absurd in the extreme, and smacks of the "democratic deficit" operating at the heart of GATS. There are loads of other reasons for concern too. For example, Wal-Mart are talking about using GATS to override regulations that limit the size, location , opening hours etc. of their megastores. Massively powerful service industry lobby groups within the EU and US are rubbing their hands with glee at what this agreement can achieve for them. (Indeed, it was the outspoken enthusiasm of the corporate lobby for GATS that first sparked alarm amongst citizens groups.) To boot, the few exemptions in GATS are commonly thought to be full of holes, GATS is "effectively irreversible", it contains disciplines which, when evolved, will be tantamount to deregulating all service-related legislation, and so on. So what can I do? Keep checking this website: at some point we'll do an analysis of areas of local community life that are already under GATS disciplines, as well as future developments. Get involved with the national campaign (WDM and GATSWatch are good places for this.) Join the WarwickshireGATS e-group, details of which are at the foot of this page. We use this for discussion and coordination, there is lots of useful information on there. Start talking to friends and colleagues about it. Think of all the areas of local life that will suffer if services are delivered purely on a for-profit basis by a massive, unconcerned, foreign company. If you can, invest a little time in helping us disseminate information in the locality about this shocking agreement. (Don't worry, we'll make our arguments more water-tight in due course!) Contact councillors at the district level in Warwickshire: Warwick District, Stratford-upon-Avon, Rugby & Kenilworth, North Warwickshire, Nuneaton & Bedworth. (We have supporters now in most of those districts and can put you in touch with them if you like.) Most of all, don't hesitate to get in touch.warwickshiregats@yahoogroups.com To join this group - and it'd be great if you could - either fill in the box below with your email address or (if you're au fait with yahoogroups) sign yourself up directly on the www.yahoogroups.com website. We send maybe one or two emails maximum a day, and (though we are of course not impartial :)) it's good stuff. The members of warwickshiregats are a mixture of campaigners from outside the Warwickshire area also studying the impact of GATS on local communities and councils - everyone's welcome! - and people living in the Warwickshire area, working together to rally against GATS in this vicinity. Even if you're not a member you can read the emails on warwickshiregats by going to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/warwickshiregats, but you have to be a member (and have a YahooID) to download stuff from the Files section of that page.Ok, don't hesitate to get in touch with me personally if you want to know more. My name's Steven Kelk (skelk@dcs.warwick.ac.uk), I live in Leamington, and I'm ever keen to hear from people interested in this! Either email me personally or give me a ring at (01926) 773808. (My role in all of this is that I'm the co-ordinator of the WarwickshireGATS group.) |