Implemented jointly by ICTSD and the World Economic Forum, the E15Initiative convenes world-class experts and institutions to generate strategic analysis and recommendations for government, business, and civil society geared towards strengthening the global trade and investment system for sustainable development. The E15 Expert Group on Services is co-convened with the National Board of Trade of Sweden . With the rise of global value chains (GVCs) and the growing prominence of services as both facilitators or very objects of supply chain dynamics, it has become commonplace for goods and services to be supplied as a bundled offering within enterprise networks. Separated (politically) at birth since the launch of the Uruguay Round of multilateral negotiations that saw services placed for the first time on the world trade agenda, the goods and services divide reflected in today’s structure of global trade governance has increasingly come into question. The fact that goods and services are increasingly supplied together and that the manufacturing process itself offers evidence of ever-heightened co-mingling of goods and services production (for example, contract-based manufacturing; automobile or aircraft financing, and so on) begs the question of the desirability and political economy feasibility of pursuing economies of scale in global rule-making by...
Written by Pierre Sauvé