Other OECD Countries. Apart from the US and the EU, the most active OECD countries were Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Sweden, and Switzerland.94 Other OECD countries with high stakes, notably the UK, would channel their interests through the EU Commis- sion. They had more or less similar strategies: they were all in favour of including some specific sectors, while being adamant on excluding others. Unfortunately, their ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ were not identical, and this was one of the factors that made the ne- gotiation on MFN quite hard: if only the few sectors where everybody could agree to be part of the ’ins’ had been included in the agreement, then the bite of (an eventual) MFN discipline would have been severely curtailed.95 4 Developing Countries Developing countries were divided into two camps. On one side, the reluctant players, that is, those that believed that there was not much in these negotiations for them and that saw no reason why the negotiation should take place in the first place.96 Which services could they export to the rest of the world? They held that their competitive advantage was in goods, not in services.97 And those services of interest to them (like tourism) were liberalized anyway. They adopted a passive – if not obstructive – atti- tude towards the negotiations, at least early on.98 Nobody better than the then Indian Ambassador Shukla to sum up the way they felt following the Punta del Este Minis- terial Declaration: In the negotiations that led to Punta del Este, developing countries were able to ensure that their concerns were taken into account in the following manner. First, the respect of the policy objectives behind national regulations was explicitly recognized in the Punta del Este mandate, which to a great extent alleviated the fears of developing countries. Second, development was stated as the ultimate goal of the negotiations, in other words whatever rules and disciplines were to emerge should promote the development of developing countries. Thus, the recognition of the development objective was to meet the concern that the element of equity could be ignored or inequity increased, as a result of the negotiations. Finally, the subject matter of the 93 xxx Xxxxxx, ‘Services and the Uruguay Round: Issues Raised in Connection with Multilateral Action on Services: a Comment’, in Petersmann and Hilf (eds), supra note 6, at 475, 479. 94 GATT document XXXX.XXX(86)3, 7 Mar. 1986. 95 Canada, the EU, Japan, and the US were meeting as ‘Quadrila...
Other OECD Countries. The government of any Member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development-which does not participate in the Agency may, on the proposal of the Executive Committee, acting by unanimity, be invited by the Governing Board of the Agency to become a Contracting Party to this Agreement (or to designate a national agency, public organization, private corporation, company or other entity to do so), under the conditions stated in paragraph (a) above.
