Trade Policy, Investment and Migration: The Liberalisation Paradigm

Presentation by Thomas Cottier & Charlotte Sieber-Gasser prepared for the Markets for Migration and Development (M4MD) Conference, Bern, 13-15 September 2011. This presentation is part of Session 1 "Why Trade, Development and Migration?" of the M4MD conference, which was one of the thematic meetings held in the context of the 2011 Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) chaired by Switzerland. Session 1 seeked to understand to what extent international trade and foreign direct investment drives migration and why states find it more difficult to liberalise the trans‐boundary movement of persons than to liberalise cross‐border trade in goods and services. One discussed aspect was why globalisation, trade liberalisation and FDI can lead not only to more, but also to less migration and what the corresponding effects on development would be. This Session provided a timely opportunity to broaden the perspective on international migration and explore the interaction between migration, development and trade policymaking.

The Preferential Liberalization of Trade in Services: African Perspectives And Challenges

This chapter takes stock of the state of play of preferential trade negotiations in services in Africa. It explores the factors that lie behind the reluctance of African governments to bind service sector policy under international treaties. The chapter chronicles several ongoing initiatives aimed at deepening intra-regional trade and investment among the eight regional economic cooperation areas found on the continent. It also describes external liberalization efforts engaging Africa with the rest of the world in services trade, devoting particular attention to negotiations underway with the European Community (EC) with a view to concluding WTO-compatible Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs). The chapter draws attention to several novel features of the EC-CARIFORUM EPA in the services field and discusses its possible implications for Africa’s ongoing processes of integration in services markets at both the intra- and extra-regional levels. The chapter concludes with a broader discussion of a range of policy challenges confronting African governments in designing development-enhancing strategies of engagement in services trade negotiations.