ISLAMABAD, March 21: The ministry of commerce in consultation with federal secretaries has finalized a draft of Pakistan’s initial offers to be submitted to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in due course of time for Foreign Service providers (FSPs). Well-placed sources in various ministries told Dawn on Monday that the whole exercise was carried out in just two to three months by making consultations with the 26 federal secretaries of different ministries in a brief ‘interaction’.

“Most of the federal secretaries were even not familiar with the articles of WTO general agreement on trade in services (GATS), so how it was possible to get a comprehensive feedback from them in such short period’, added the sources.

Furthermore, this draft offers will be finalized in a meeting to be held on Tuesday by these federal secretaries and four federal ministers without any handsome representation from the private sector.

According to the sources, the ministry of commerce has not quantified the actual impact of liberalization of the services sectors as to how much investment would be attracted by liberalizing the services sector, ratio of local employment generation and what are the domestic services possibly to be replaced, which might result in unemployment and transfers of funds out of the country.

These are the questions needed to be addressed before going for making any offers in haste, added the sources. These sources said that the ministry of commerce never took the issue seriously over the last three years as Pakistan was supposed to make the initial offers by March 2003 and any offers made in haste in the services sectors, it is feared, might cause more hardship to the poor people of the country.

The sources maintained that the need to be extra careful in this regard has arisen because of the past experience in liberalizing some of the services sectors, which more often led to decline in quality and standards of services and increased the prices.

Under GATs, an international standard would be imposed on the service providers. It might create an uneven playing field for local service providers resulting huge job laying offs, even closure of domestic businesses.

The developed countries have already provided due protection to their consumers by enacting consumer protection laws in their countries through which they could easily monitor the services of foreign countries. However, in Pakistan there was no law for consumer protection.

The major concern for Pakistan in the liberalization of its service sector was that the consumers might become vulnerable to the whims of the private concerns and confront problems like those of equity and access, high tariffs, arbitrary price increase, non-availability of goods and services in certain conditions and deteriorating quality of goods and services, result in monopoly with efficient service providers with higher cost, etc.

To address all these worries most of the developed and developing countries have worked out the initial offers in the services sectors to the WTO member countries following an extensive deliberation with relevant stakeholders of each and every service.

They had sought their views on making offers in the services sector through holding of seminars, meetings, publishing of articles in the print media, holding of interviews of experts on electronic media and conducting survey through electronic and print media before finalizing their initial offers.

But, in case of Pakistan, the officials are working out the offers in the federal capital to be applied across the country following implementation. Foreign investment in the services sectors like banking, insurance and health sectors would be good from consumer point of view as quality of service would improve but there should be some regulation to ensure that they provided quality service to all consumers at reasonable prices.