Lucian Cernat

International public procurement: From scant facts to hard data

Public procurement is a negotiating area gaining in importance at multilateral and bilateral level, as evidenced by a brief review of procurement provisions in existing trade agreements. The size of procurement spending stands in most developed economies at double-digit percentage points of GDP. However, despite the size and importance of these markets, the factual information available to trade negotiators remains scarce. Although public procurement patterns (e.g. size of procurement markets, composition of procurement spending and level of government procurement) can be derived from traditional national accounts statistics, these figures fall short of capturing the international dimension of public procurement. Hence, the paper puts forward a basic conceptual framework for data collection on public procurement that would best serve the future negotiating agenda in this area.

The EU Everything But Arms Initiative and the LDCs

In recent years there have been increased pressures to help the poorest nations through aid, debt relief and trade initiatives. At the first Ministerial Meeting of the WTO in Singapore in 1996, the then Director-General of the WTO, Renato Ruggiero, declared his intention to press WTO members to afford tariff and quota-free entry to imports from the least developed countries (LDCs) to the markets of the developed countries. This initiative bore fruit in 2000, when the EU Trade Commissioner, Pascal Lamy, announced the intention to grant duty-free and quota-free access for all goods (with the exception of arms) originating in LDCs — its ‘Everything But Arms’ (EBA) initiative, under which it proposed to reduce to zero all tariffs on imports from LDCs except arms and to free such imports from any quantitative restriction. Other developed countries have made similar proposals, including the US African Growth and Opportunities Act (AGOA), but in terms of the value of trade the EU proposal is the most important. This chapter evaluates the EU proposal, using ex ante trade simulation techniques, and draws some tentative conclusions.