Serving Whose Interests?: The Political Economy of Trade in Services Agreements

417 Pages·2008·5.15 MB·English

by  Jane Kelsey

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3111 Services permeate almost every moment of our daily lives, whether they are
4 social services such as education, media and midwifery, or inputs to capitalist
5 production such as finance, transport, energy and telecommunications. Yet
6 they are being purged of their social essence in the name of ‘trade’ and
7 relegated to commodities in an international marketplace. Serving Whose
8 Interests? explores the political economy of ‘trade in services’ agreements
9 from a critical legal perspective.
20111 The complex ‘trade’ regime put in place by the General Agreement on
1 Trade in Services, and a new generation of GATS-compliant bilateral and
2 regional agreements, has the potential to constrain the policy choices of
3 virtually every government in the world. These agreements are exclusively
4 the tools of contemporary global capitalism, yet are represented as the
5 new pathway for development through the seemingly benign medium of
6 international trade law. In an evolving chess game, attempts by the major
7 powers to secure national regulations and policies that boost the profits of
8 their transnational corporations and advance their geopolitical ambitions
9 are being frustrated by reluctant Southern governments and the resistance
30111 of social activists. This book draws out the contradictions between the global
1 market model and the intrinsically social nature of services through a
2 combination of theoretical analysis of the legal texts and truly global case
3 studies of the social and political implications, leading the author to question
4 the sustainability of the trade in services regime.
5 The product of extensive research by an internationally renowned expert
6 in the area, yet written in an accessible manner, Serving Whose Interests?
7 will be of interest to trade specialists, academics, students and activists
8 working in the areas of international trade and international trade law, and
9 other informed readers with interests in the politics and regulation of the
40111 global economy.
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2 Professor Jane Kelseyspecialises in the political economy of law and policy
3 at the University of Auckland. She has been an academic and activist critic
44111 of neoliberal globalisation, especially trade in services, since the early 1990s.
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The political economy of trade
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4 in services agreements
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1 Jane Kelsey
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44111 a GlassHouse book
Published 2008
by Routledge-Cavendish
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge-Cavendish
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY10016
Routledge-Cavendish is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
© 2008 Jane Kelsey
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Kelsey, Jane.
Serving whose interests?: the political economy of international
trade in services agreements/Jane Kelsey.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Service industries – Law and legislation. 2. General Agreement
on Trade in Services (1994). I. Title.
K3973.K45 2008
343′078–dc22 2008002089
ISBN 0-203-93393-1 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN10: 0–415–44821–2 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0–415–44822–0 (pbk)
ISBN10: 0–203–93393–1 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–44821–5 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–44822–2 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–203–93393–0 (ebk)
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For Upendra Baxi,
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sage and friend
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1111 Contents
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3111 Preface ix
4 Abbreviations xii
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Introduction: taking services to market 1
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9 1 Reading the GATS as ideology 22
20111 Case study 1 GATS 2000: going nowhere in a hurry 42
1 Case study 2 FTAs: GATS on steroids 50
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3 2 How the GATS was won (and lost?) 58
4 Case study 3 The ‘services mafia’ 76
5 Case study 4 Understanding the ‘GATS attack’ 82
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3 Trade-related development 89
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Case study 5 The WDR 2004: making services work
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for rich companies 104
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Case study 6 The closed circuit of summitry 110
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4 The illusion of public services 119
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Case study 7 Accounting for PFIs 137
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Case study 8 Privatising power in the Philippines 144
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7 5 Ruling the services infrastructure 152
8 Case study 9 Gambling on the GATS 174
9 Case study 10 Public pensions or corporate welfare? 181
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1 6 Trade in people 189
2 Case study 11 Call centres – the assembly line of the
3 twenty-first century 206
44111 Case study 12 Taking nurses and soldiers to market 213
viii Contents
1111 7 Minds and markets 221
2 Case study 13 The higher education supply chain 241
3 Case study 14 A counter-convention on cultural diversity 248
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5 8 Dominion over the earth 255
6 Case study 15 Wal-Mart rules, OK? 270
7 Case study 16 The real Cancún 276
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9 9 Energy wars 284
1011 Case study 17 Confronting ‘El Diablo’ 302
1 Case study 18 Gulf accessions: a legal invasion 310
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Conclusion: serving whose interests? 318
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6 Notes 327
7 Bibliography 353
8 Index 375
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3111 I was first introduced to the notion that services might be governed by
4 global trade rules at a gathering of several hundred social activists and
5 progressive researchers that ran parallel to the General Agreement on Tariffs
6 and Trade (GATT) Ministerial Conference in Brussels in 1990. At the time
7 I knew little about the Uruguay round, even in the traditional area of trade
8 in goods. The notion of complementary ‘trade’ agreements that locked in
9 the neoliberalisation of services and investment, and US-style intellectual
20111 property laws, on an international scale seemed far-fetched. The proposal
1 for a single World Trade Organization (WTO) to oversee such agreements
2 had not yet been tabled.
3 Yet the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) also seemed a
4 logical next step in the reorganisation of international capital. Since 1984
5 I had been documenting New Zealand’s role as a laboratory for radical
6 neoliberal policies – the Economist magazine dubbed it ‘Chile without
7 the gun’. There was an obvious continuity between our experience of
8 deregulation, liberalisation, privatisation and state sector restructuring and
9 an international agreement on services that could legitimise and embed such
30111 changes – even if our trade officials insisted there was no connection between
1 international trade rules and the domestic services regime.
2 Since that 1990 meeting I have monitored the arcane world of the trade
3 in services agreements, watching the GATS become paralysed by controversy
4 and inertia and spin off in diverse bilateral and regional forms. At the time
5 of writing, the Doha round of negotiations remains moribund and the
6 US President’s Trade Promotion Authority (‘fast track’) has expired. The
7 burgeoning array of new generation free trade agreements is supplanting
8 the GATS as a site for competition between the major powers, ambitious
9 demands by transnational companies, and campaigns of resistance.
40111 This book reflects my dissatisfaction with the level of critical analysis
1 that currently informs the debate around trade in services. Most public
2 engagement with the issues is starkly polarised and expressed through
3 pro- and anti-GATS rhetoric (including my own), which is necessarily
44111 simplified and polemical. At the more technical level, the WTO, World