mGovernment Magazine - Issue 25

XXII / 1

World Trade Organization,
Trade liberalization and
Telecommunications Sector
By: Mohammed Fadel Lari
Legal Advisor
The establishment of World Trade
Organizationhasamajorroleinthecountries›
trend towards the liberalization of most of
their economic sectors to cope up with the
wave of privatization and globalization that
overwhelmed the economies of countries
in line with the requirements of New World
Order.
The WTO is manly meant to liberalize the
tradeof commodities and services around the
world.
The telecommunications sector is the most
important sector, which the WTO pays great
attention. TheWTOmember states have held
long discussions and managed to adopt a
protocol annexed to The General Agreement
on Trade in Services (GATS) related to this
sector.
From here, we are going to review at the
beginning of this article a historical brief on
the role of World Trade Organization in the
field of liberalizing trade and services and
then we will address the special nature of this
sector.
We will present, in this issue, a historical
brief on trade liberalization of commodities.
Afterwards, we are going to reviewahistorical
brief on trade liberalization of services
(Uruguay Round). Finally, we will conclude
with the first discussion held before the
World Trade Organization regarding the
liberalization of the Telecommunications
Sector.
The World Economy has gone through
decades of relative stability before the World
War I in terms of the international trade or
monetary relations during the period ranging
between 1860 and 1913. At this period, the
world trade relations had revolved around
number of bilateral trade agreements, in
which each country had the freedom to
determine and change the Customs Tariff
Act without any multilateral cooperation or a
supervisory mechanism.
At the end of World War II, Twenty-three
countries started, in particular USA, Canada
and the United Kingdom, to negotiate over a
general agreement concerning customs tariff
and trade.
The negotiation was meant to conclude
an agreement that could ensure economic
stability after the war and avoid repeating the
past mistakes as the customs fees, from the
opinions of advocates of this agreement, were
themain reason for deteriorationof the global
economy. Hence, the General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was concluded in
1947 in order to be a new solid pillar of rules
and exception to organize the international
trade among parties to this agreement with a
purpose of reducing the customs tariffs.
The main motivation behind the conclusion
of GATT Agreement was an attempt to avoid
disastrous consequences of the period
between World War I and II, which included
a series of local economic failures. Therefore,
there was a need to have a new perception
for international monetary system that
eliminated trade barriers and ended the
discriminatory trade policies to avoid the
extension of failure into the global economy
and get rid of the economic recession.
The GATT Agreement started with 23
countries: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Burma
(Myanmar), Canada, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Chili,
China, Cuba,Czechoslovakia (CzechRepublic
and Slovakia), France, India, Lebanon,
Luxemburg, Netherlands, New Zealand,
Norway, Pakistan, South Africa and Southern
Rhodesia, (Zimbabwe), Syria,UnitedKingdom
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