Maritime Transport Services in the World Trade Organization

Abstract

With the World Trade Organization (WTO), a new, most powerful actor has emerged in the field of international trade regulation that has come to govern the bulk of world trade and today constitutes the forum for successful international trade liberalization in both the goods and (for the first time on the multilateral level) the service sector. The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), which came into force on 1 January 1995 and is incorporated in the WTO regime, is the only global and legally enforceable services agreement and is binding on all 146 WTO Members. It covers in its scope and membership over 90 percent of all international trade in services. Also from its membership structure (all major industrialized nations are WTO Members but at the same time, the majority of Member States – about 100 out of 146 – are less and least developed countries), the organization has the potential to achieve a globally liberalized service market. This is also and especially true in the important field of maritime transport services, where the best chances to achieve an efficient global shipping service market without governmentsponsored distortions of competition, free of restrictions and government protectionism lie in the WTO framework, as has also been acknowledged by the European Commission. How far liberalization has occurred in that sector and the role that maritime transport services assume in the WTO shall be analyzed in detail in the following pages after a general introduction to the WTO/GATS framework.