ITA Expansion Talks Aim for Final Product
List by July
Members working on the proposed expansion
of the WTO’s Information Technology Agreement - a plurilateral
pact aimed at liberalising trade in information and communication technology
products - are aiming to have a final list of goods to add to the deal’s
coverage ready by the summer break.
The ITA provides for participants to completely eliminate
duties on IT products covered by the agreement. The process to update the deal -
which first entered into force in 1997 - began last spring, when Canada, Japan,
Korea, the Separate Customs Territory of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen
and Matsu, Singapore, and the US presented a concept paper calling for
negotiations to expand the pact’s product coverage and membership.
Since then, the number of members working on the ITA
expansion has increased from the original six in May 2012 to approximately 20
today. However, this group does not encompass all of the ITA’s 49 participants,
which now covers 76 members - including the 27-member EU — after this month’s
addition of Tajikistan to the pact.
The
group discussing the ITA expansion has been meeting monthly since the start of
this year to evaluate tariff and non-tariff issues that would feature in an
updated agreement. With regards to tariffs, members at this stage have
eliminated a total of 120 items from a proposed list of products to add to the
ITA’s coverage - a list that had originally numbered over 350.
Of these, 22 were removed last week alone, according to
sources familiar with the discussions. Some of the products removed were
reportedly deemed too sensitive by some of the participants involved; others,
meanwhile, were ultimately considered irrelevant to the overall ITA pact.
Whittling down the list has already been a tough process,
some members acknowledged at Friday’s meeting of the ITA Committee. Korea, for
instance, called the removal of some of its original proposals a “difficult
decision,” sources told Bridges. Hong Kong, meanwhile, noted that there is
still a need to remove more products.
Looking forward, delegates familiar with the talks noted that
the process of eliminating more products could pose some challenges. “The idea
of deleting things can’t continue indefinitely,” one said ahead of last week’s
meetings. “Sensitivities are now coming up - the question is how you deal with
those, and there hasn’t really been a structured way of doing that up to now.”
The goal, Switzerland noted last Friday, is to reach a
product expansion that is “credible for industry and manageable for customs
administrations.”
What role China will ultimately play in the discussions has
also captured the attention of trade observers. While sources say that Beijing
had been “very passive and quiet” in the early technical discussions, China has
now reportedly provided a list of its priority products that it would like to
see in an expanded ITA - a list that is expected to generate substantial
discussion in the coming months.
The
group is planning to hold additional meetings in April, May, June, and July in
order to refine and streamline the list further. Sources say that the group
hopes to have a new consolidated and agreed list by the end of July.
With the current talks being conducted by only a subset of
the ITA’s membership, how the expanded product list would be extended to the
rest of the group is another issue that “remains to be worked out,” and is
likely to become an increasingly prominent topic as the Bali ministerial
approaches.