Brussels, 01/06/2016 (Agence Europe) - Three ministerial meetings were scheduled on the sidelines of the annual ministerial meeting of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris on Wednesday 1 and Thursday 2 June in order to move the different trade negotiation processes forwards - the WTO Doha Round and the plurilateral negotiations for an international Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) and for an Environmental Goods Agreement (EGA).
Moving forward on the post-Nairobi WTO agenda. The ministers from the OECD countries meeting in Paris are due to meet WTO Secretary General Roberto Azevedo on Thursday afternoon for an informal session chaired by Australia and Norway on the negotiations for liberalising world trade and the post-Nairobi WTO Doha Round. The 10th WTO ministerial conference in Nairobi, which resulted in an agreement at the end of December 2015 on the end to agricultural export subsidy programmes (see EUROPE 11458), also opened the agenda for work on new issues such as digital trade. “The objective of the meeting is to relaunch the WTO negotiation programme by means of new approaches and proposals for issues posing challenges for world trade”, the Commission told EUROPE.
Speeding up the TiSA talks. On Wednesday afternoon, European Commissioner for Trade Cecilia Malmström was due to chair a ministerial meeting of stakeholder countries in the future TiSA. Technical level negotiations for the TiSA are continuing in Geneva this week, as part of the 18th round of talks at which the participants are due to present their revised offers on access to services markets (see EUROPE 11559). The TiSA negotiations were launched in 2013 and involve 23 countries - Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Hong Kong, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Liechtenstein, Mauritius, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, the EU and the USA.
Moving the EGA negotiations forward. The ministers from the OECD countries were also due to meet on Thursday 2 June with the aim of moving the negotiations forward for a plurilateral agreement on liberalising environmental goods (EGA). These negotiations have been cruising along on the path mapped out by the stakeholder countries since early March, following the COP 21 climate conference (see EUROPE 11515).
Involved in these negotiations since July 2014, the stakeholder countries in the EGA - Australia, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Hong Kong, Iceland, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, and the USA - deepened their discussions at the 13th round of technical level talks in mid-April on the products that should be included in the future agreement, and the technical work on the customs classification of the 340 environmental goods included on a list that was decided upon in December 2015 (see EUROPE 11546). The next round is scheduled for 20 June.
OECD discusses inclusive growth. These three meetings are due to be held on the sidelines of the OECD Council of Ministers on Wednesday and Thursday which is to be chaired by Chile and focus on the theme of “how to achieve higher productivity and enhance inclusiveness”. The ministers are due to explore policies that respond to productivity growth and inclusion goals in mutually reinforcing ways, the OECD says in a press release. The ministers are also due to discuss the economic outlook, the strategic orientations of the OECD, how to help achieve the sustainable development goals, and how to strengthen the contribution of trade and investment to productivity and inclusive growth. (Original version in French by Emmanuel Hagry)