Introduction

The negotiations for China's accession to the WTO took almost fifteen years, but, as the saying goes, timing is everything. If China had joined the GATT, the negotiations would have been far easier since GATT-ese market access was mainly about border barriers, but since the Uruguay Round not only does the concept of market access embrace domestic regulatory policies but also both substantive and procedural legal issues. The barriers to access for service providers stem from laws, regulations, administrative actions that impede cross-border trade and factor flows. Implicit in this shift embodied in the GATS is a move away from GATT negative regulation – what governments must not do – to positive regulation – what governments must do. This aspect is now apparent in the telecommunications reference paper that sets out a common framework for the regulation of competition in basic telecommunications and is likely to be adopted in other sectors. In the case of intellectual property the move to positive regulation is more dramatic, since the negotiations covered not only standards for domestic laws but also detailed provisions for procedures to enforce individual (corporate) property rights. But the Uruguay Round also dealt with social regulation, which has grown so rapidly in the OECD countries since the 1970s that it has been termed ‘regulatory inflation’.