What Is The Wto Government Procurement Agreement

Article XIII:1 of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) provides that public contracts for services are not subject to the obligation of the most favoured nation of the GATS (Article II), nor to specific obligations concerning market access (Article XVI) and national treatment (Article XVII). WTO members are therefore not currently subject to any market access or non-discrimination requirements for public procurement of services under the GATS. Article XIII, paragraph 2, also stipulates that multilateral negotiations on public procurement in the services sector will take place within two years of the agreement`s entry into force. Within the OECD, efforts have been made at an early stage to ensure that public procurement is subject to internationally accepted trade rules. This issue was introduced during the ongoing trade negotiations in Tokyo in 1976. As a result, the first public procurement agreement was signed in 1979 and came into force in 1981. It concerned only the central government and the purchase of goods. It was amended in 1987 and this amended version came into force in 1988. Preferential treatment of domestic goods, services and suppliers discriminates against foreign suppliers and therefore acts as a barrier to trade in this sector. These obstacles are not removed by wto multilateral rules, as public procurement is expressly excluded from the main disciplines of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, Article III: 8 bis) and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS see Article XIII:1). National public procurement seminars are organised by the secretariat on request and for the benefit of some WTO members. National seminars have the advantage of being able to meet the specific needs of the wto applicant member and to open up more national participants. The Public Procurement Agreement (GPA) is a multi-lateral agreement, under the auspices of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which governs the purchase of goods and services by the public authorities of the contracting parties, based on the principles of openness, transparency and non-discrimination.

The accession process begins with the submission of an application for membership and has two main aspects: negotiations between the member member and the parties to the GPA on the offer of coverage of the GPA and the verification of the compliance of the member`s contracting rules with the requirements of the GPA, for example in terms of transparency, procedural fairness for suppliers and national control. The GPA is a multi-lateral agreement, which means that it only engages WTO members who are parties and have therefore agreed to be linked to it. It currently has 20 parties, with 48 WTO members. These include five new contracting parties whose memberships became effective after the revised GPA came into force. > To learn more about the GATS Service Supply Negotiations Here: Albania, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Cameroon, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, Georgia, India, Jordan, Kyrgyz Republic, Moldova, Mongolia, New Zealand, Oman, Panama, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Ukraine. In addition, four intergovernmental organizations, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the International Trade Centre (CITI), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), have observer status on the WTO`s Public Procurement Committee, which manages the agreement. Public procurement is of considerable economic importance, both domestic and international, and accounts for a significant share of national GDP.