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Trade in Educational Services and the Doha WTO Round: the need to move out of current impasse

“Trade in educational services (ES) is a potentially very lucrative source of revenue for a country and its schools, universities and training providers. For example, exports of ES and their respective share of all exported services in 2000 amounted to 10.28 Billion USD (3.5%) for the USA and 2.155 Billion USD (11.8%) for Australia. Looking at the world market of ES, the total value of annual trade in 1999 in higher education services has been estimated at 30 Billion USD reaching 50% of trade in financial services estimated at 59.3 Billion USD. These figures would even be higher if estimates were available for total trade in ES. Higher education is only one of five sub sectors in ES. Not included are trade in primary secondary and adult education services.”

Saner, R. 2005. Trade in Educational Services and the Doha WTO Round: the need to move out of current impasse. Paper presented at the ECG-WTO, August 2005.

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Negotiating Trade in Educational Services within the WTO/GATS Context

Trade in Educational Services (ES) is affecting the interests of many countries in trade, economics, education and culture resulting in heated debates between government representatives, private sector investors, teacher unions and student associations on how to approach liberalisation of this sector, if at all. What ever the approach, an agreement on GATS/ES should be sufficiently flexible to safeguard the multi-functional nature of education, as well as the different needs of developing countries’ education without falling into the trap of “managed trade” nor succumbing to short-term myopic protectionism.

The authors describe the complexities of the WTO/GATS negotiations on trade in educational services and outline ways on how negotiations of GATS/ES could be successfully completed within the timeframe of the Doha Round.

Mainstreaming Decent Work Agenda in the Poverty Reduction Strategy Plan, ILO, Geneva

CSEND conducted research on how to best include employment and decent work into the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP), the successor instrument of the IMF/WB following their failed Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP). CSEND drafted a major document titled "Decent Work and Poverty Reduction Strategies: An ILO Advocacy Guidebook" and developed a 24 role negotiation simulation concerning PRSPs. The simulation was pilot-tested in Ethiopia (2003) and Cameroon (2005). The Guidebook was published by ILO, Geneva, April 2005.

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Global Governance and Diplomacy: World's Apart ?

New publication titled "Business - Government - NGO Relations: Their Impact on Global Economic Governance" in the book "Global Governance and Diplomacy: World's Apart ?", edited by Andrew F. Cooper, Brian Hocking and William Maley. 2008, Palgrave Macmillan

Technical Assitance to Least Developed Countries (LDCs) in the context of the Doha Development Round (DDR): High risk of failure

Saner, Raymond; Paez, Laura; “Technical Assitance to Least Developed Countries (LDCs) in the context of the Doha Development Round (DDR): High risk of failure”, (accepted for publication in Journal of World Trade,) spring 2006

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