By Jonathan Lynn
GENEVA, Feb 6 (Reuters) - Trading nations have agreed to resume negotiations on liberalising trade in services such as banking and telecoms next month at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) despite caution arising from the financial crisis.
Hamid Mamdouh, director of the WTO's trade in services division, said on Friday after two days of talks on the sector that a series of meetings would take place between March 30 and April 8 on a range of services issues.
These would be the first services negotiations since last July's meeting of ministers seeking a breakthrough in the WTO's seven-year-old Doha round.
Although that meeting collapsed without a result, ministers then held an unexpectedly successful "signalling conference" to indicate what they were willing to do in services.
Mamdouh told a briefing that the crisis had made negotiators more cautious, but none were rolling back their positions.
"Nobody said that we are reversing liberalisation or we're not going to liberalise, nobody said that," he said. "Everybody said we need to move cautiously.
"A lot of people said that what is happening makes the success of the negotiations even more important than before."
Services, which can range from restaurant or construction work to accounting, software and healthcare, account for two-thirds or more of industrialised economies and often one-half of developing nation economies, but make up only about one fifth of world trade.
Reflecting the importance of services, U.S. senators agreed on Thursday to allow service industry and public sector workers to qualify for federal retraining and extended unemployment benefits if they lose their jobs because of foreign competition.
Mamdouh drew a distinction between the liberalisation that is targeted under WTO deals and the deregulation blamed by many for the financial crisis.
Trade liberalisation simply means giving foreign providers access to your market and then treating them the same way as domestic businesses, he said.
Even after opening their markets to foreign competition, countries retain the right to regulate -- as long as they treat local and foreign businesses in the same way.
While deregulation and privatisation had often been features of structural adjustment programmes agreed with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, they were not issues in the trade in services agreement known as GATS, he said.
The forthcoming negotiations involve a "cluster" of meetings on a range of services issues, including bilateral request/offer talks between interested countries, Mamdouh said.
There will also be special committees on specific topics such as domestic regulation and financial services, finishing on April 8 -- after the summit of G20 rich and emerging nations in London on the financial crisis -- with negotiations among the entire WTO membership.