A Joint Meeting of Commissions 19 and 31 was held during the IAU General Assembly at Delhi to consider the recommendations for a new international earth-rotation service put forward by the IAU/IUGG Joint Working Groups on the rotation of the Earth and the conventional terrestrial reference system. Wilkins gave summaries of the MERIT programme of activities to monitor earth rotation and intercompare the techniques of observation and analysis and of the COTES programme to establish the basis of a new conventional terrestrial reference system. He reviewed the recommendations of the Groups, and then introduced a draft resolution of the Commissions. An amendment on the continuation of the use of the technique of optical astrometry was accepted and the resolution was then adopted without objection. Four papers on work related to the MERIT/COTES programmes were then presented. Paquet discussed the agreement in the results by different techniques for polar motion and universal time. Preuss presented a paper by Campbell and Schuh on short-period variations in earth-rotation determined by VLBI. Dickey discussed the intercomparisons between the earth-orientation parameters obtained by different techniques and then reviewed the close correlation between the length of the day and the angular momentum of the atmosphere. Finally, Vicente and Verbeiren presented new techniques for processing time and polar motion series.