RP’s Dr. PASADILLA endorsed as CONVENOR OF APEC’S Group oN Services  

25 January 2007 – The APEC Group on Services (GOS) endorsed and designated the Philippines as Convenor of the group for 2007-2008 at its meeting in Canberra on 22 January 2007. The country’s convenorship follows that of interim Convenor Australia and Hongkong, China.  

The Philippine APEC National Secretariat headed by DFA Undersecretary for International Economic Relations Edsel Custodio proposed Dr. Gloria Pasadilla, whose nomination was accepted by the Group on Services. 

Dr. Pasadilla is a Senior Research Fellow at the Philippine Institute for Development Studies and a professor at the University of Asia and the Pacific. Dr. Pasadilla obtained her Masters Degree in International Law and Economics, summa cum laude, at the World Trade Institute of the University of Berne in Switzerland. She earned her Ph.D. in Economics from the New York University. She is also the Research Director for the Integrative Study on Services Trade Policy of the Philippine Services Coalition   

The Group welcomed her ideas in guiding the substantive direction of GOS projects and fostering closer collaboration with the WTO in capacity building activities. 

Trade in Services is the fastest growing component of international trade, made possible by the revolution in ICT. Services is the dominant sector in many economies, both in contribution to economic activity and to generation of total number of jobs. Among developing regions, Asia leads service exports by accounting for 69% of the total. In the Philippines, revenues for IT-enabled services exports alone were estimated at US$ 1.3 billion in 2004, US$ 2.1 billion in 2005, and US$ 3.3 billion in 2006 

The Group of Services is an informal group of APEC’s Committee on Trade and Investment (CTI). At its first meeting on 31 January 1997 in Victoria, Canada, which was chaired by Chile, GOS agreed that work on trade in services would concentrate on information gathering and analysis, experience sharing and transparency. Since then, GOS has tackled a wide range of issues including skills standardization, regulatory and liberalization checklists, and WTO trade in services negotiations.   

For 2006, the GOS Work Program, as embodied in its Collective Action Plan, consisted of developing and implementing the Menu of Options for Voluntary Liberalization, Facilitation and Promotion of ECOTECH in Services Trade and Investment, compiling services statistics to improve understanding of impact of services trade, supporting WTO services negotiations, and services capacity building.            

GOS works within CTI to undertake efforts furthering APEC priorities such as strengthening the multilateral trading system and encouraging economic reform and trade facilitation. APEC’s theme in 2007, as presented by Australia are as follows: strengthening the APEC Community, building Sustainable Future commitments to implement APEC reform, and fortifying APEC’s economic and technical cooperation pillar of APEC. END

/jay

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