Financial Services in the Doha Round and China＇s Commitments

Current negotiations on financial services at the WTO are concerned with improving liberalization commitments over the Financial Services Agreement which became an integral part of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) in 1997. Important underlying issues of these negotiations are member states‘ policy decisions in two particular areas: capital account liberalization and prudential regulation. These decisions not only determine the member countries‘ scope for liberalization,, the liberalization commitments in turn also limit the scope of national economic poliey in these two areas. Taking these characteristics offinancial services talks into account, there are two major goals for the ongoing negotiations:for industrialized countries to make progress with respect to trade business and for developing countries and emerging-market economies to concentrate on improving market access on an established basis. For China, the most important goal is to implement the far-reaching liberalization commitments that were made in the context of its accession to the WTO in December 2001.