ABOUT THIS BOOK

This book is intended to help you find and interpret for your own purposes the lists of commitments made by World Trade Organization (WTO) members on the taxation and regulation of imported goods and on market access and national treatment in services. These documents, known as the goods and services Schedules, are an important part of the WTO Agreement; the commitments in the Schedules are negotiated by each WTO member government during rounds of multilateral trade negotiations or at the time it accedes to the WTO, and updated in various ways after that.

The WTO Agreement covers all trade in physical goods and, with limited exceptions, commercial services such as telecommunications, finance, transport and so on. The Schedules bind the actions of member governments with the same force as the Agreement; they represent, in some respects, its ‘cash value’. They deserve careful attention. But their volume (some 27,000 pages), the difficulty of consulting them, and the challenge of interpreting the meaning of entries in the Schedules, mean that many non-specialists shy away from consulting them. This Handbook is meant to help fix that.

‘Non-specialists’ could mean anyone who has not had to deal with the Schedules in the past, including some government officials. But the people who are likely to find this book most helpful are:

• business leaders and advisors, especially those with a role in industry or trade associations;

• importers and exporters who deal with customs matters or regulations affecting trade in services such as finance, transportation or communications;

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