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The purpose of the symposium was “to evaluate current
developments in international tourism” of relevance to the ongoing
WTO services negotiations, and especially those developments related
to a proposal from three developing countries, the Dominican Republic,
El Salvador and Honduras, to add a tourism annex to the General
Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). WTO Members decided to hold an
informal Symposium, in order to be able to invite a wider range of
tourism experts, including from the private sector, as well as to more
freely discuss the issues concerned.
Symposium
presentations and discussions were centred upon three major themes.
Session I, titled Specificity of Tourism as a Set of Industries
Heavily Dependent on Network Services, and its Treatment in GATS,
included a statistical overview of current trends in international
tourism; a presentation on the complex sectoral economic linkages in
tourism and the role of the Tourism Satellite Account (a statistical
methodology for measuring the economy-wide impact of tourism); and an
overview by the WTO Secretariat of the existing GATS disciplines and
commitments.
Session
II, titled The Competitive Environment — Travel Distribution
Systems, Access to Information and Issues Related to Passenger
Transport, concerned the rapidly changing commercial linkages
behind the supply of tourism services, as well as reports on
national-level experiences with the entire range of tourism-related
issues by Cuba, Jamaica, Portugal and Thailand. Presentations were
given on tour operators, global distribution systems (GDS), and travel
agents; international tourism and passenger transport; electronic
commerce; competition issues, including the existence of
anti-competitive practices; and the social, economic and environmental
sustainability of international tourism.
Session
III was an Open Debate of all the issues concerned. Topics
raised in the discussions for the Symposium as a whole included
visa-related restrictions (a general problem for almost all aspects of
international trade); the imperfect nature of both tourism statistics
and tourism classification systems; effects of horizontal restrictions
(e.g. lack of guaranteed market access for skilled workers); profit
levels of tour operators; and anti-competitive practices in
home-country markets, including aviation-related practices.
Introduction by the chairman (2 pages; 29 KB in
Word format)
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