ISLAMABAD: Investment in development and promotion of services sector is important to enhance exports of services and will also increase exports of goods which heavily depend on quality services like banking, insurance, infrastructure etc.
This was the message given by Fazal Abbas Mekan, Additional Secretary Commerce while addressing the inaugural session of a training workshop on Trade in Services here the other day.
He appreciated the role of EU in capacity building of the trade officers in the country and thanked Prof. Pierre Sauve for coming to Pakistan.
He expressed his concern over the view point of developing countries in trade negotiations on services that mode 3 and 4 are not encouraged by developed countries which are of paramount importance for developing countries.
He none the less emphasized the role of quality services in value addition, as without improving the quality of services, the quality of products cannot be improved considerably.
He emphasized the need to invest in development of human capital through technical education.
He flagged that Pakistan is the only country from Asia which is negotiating the bilateral agreement on trade in services to get market access for its services providers and exporters.
He said that Pakistan was vertous to put in place policies to open its market but it is now time to benefit from those policies.
While introducing the purpose of the training and its importance Mr. Sajid Hussain Director General PITAD, highlighted that EU funded TRTA II has given impetus to the concept of capacity building of stakeholders from public and private sector on issues related to international trade and WTO law.
He thanked the International Trade Centre (ITC) and World Trade Institute (WTI) for developing training modules and their international accreditation for PITAD.
He flaged that so far more than 1000 stakeholders have been trained on different policy issues with the assistance of ITC and WTI in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad over the last two years.
He informed that there is a growing demand for the PITAD capacity building courses from other commercial centres like Faisalabad, Sialkot etc to take these trainings to their places to create awareness and opportunities for trade.
The training course was jointly conducted by International Trade Centre (ITC) and PITAD under the EU funded TRTA II programme.
The TRTA II programme has three main components where Component 1 is about trade policy capacity building and is implemented by ITC. The training is delivered by Professor Pierre Sauve, head of academics and external programmes at the World Trade Institute, Switzerland in association with his master trainer from Ministry of Commerce Shafiq Shahzad.
Professor Pierre Sauve a renowned international expert on Trade in Services thoroughly described the importance of services trade and comparative policy environment in different countries. He described the rules of thumb for services negotiations and covered various commitments of Pakistan in bilateral services trade agreements.
Particular attention was given to analyze and identify Pakistan's negotiating priorities in the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA).
The training provided a good opportunity to the participants to understand issues related to Services trade and enabled them to effectively contribute to government policies in that connection. Proff. Sauve also compared the relative policies of Pakistan and India regarding Services sector which demonstrated that Pakistan has liberal policies but to tap benefits from the huge potential in services, some drastic measures including security and image building would be required.
The training workshop was attended by more than 100 participants from public sector, private sector and academia.
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