Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-09-03-Speech-3-357"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20080903.26.3-357"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spoken text |
"Mr President, let me start by thanking the rapporteur for his openness and cooperation. However, having said that, our group will not be able to support this report in tomorrow’s vote, partly indeed because of this presumption that trade in services is essentially exactly the same as trade in goods. As Mrs Castex has already said, that simply is not the case. We cannot agree with that, not least because trade in services almost always requires changes in national legislation or in implementing regulations, which often go to the very heart of the social fabric of a society, especially if it concerns basic services on which people depend.
It also goes against the evidence that WTO members themselves increasingly distinguish between trade in goods and trade in services. At the last WTO ministerial meeting just a few months ago in July in Geneva, a group of Latin American countries even circulated a proposal to remove health care, education, water, telecommunications and energy entirely from the WTO, exactly on the basis that these are essentially public services and they are human rights which should not be treated as tradable commodities. Finally, the report does quote quite selectively some positive national examples of liberalisation and basic services, but it does not refer at all to the very many devastating examples which could equally well have been cited and which we ought to be mindful of as well.
The issue that I want to focus on is the problem of the liberalisation of financial services. No issue has dominated the headlines more this year than the global financial crisis. It is widely agreed to have been facilitated by a lack of adequate regulation in financial markets. Yet, in the WTO negotiations on services, further deregulation and liberalisation of financial markets is being sought by richer countries, and indeed this report entirely supports that proposal. It does seem a bit ironic to me that the WTO Director, Pascal Lamy, has called for a conclusion to the WTO agenda as a solution to the global financial crisis when its actual policies would, by any objective estimation, probably be much more likely to contribute to further financial instability.
I am disappointed that all our amendments that would have required at least a pause in further liberalisation of financial services until the financial stability forum has issued its recommendations about some basic new regulations such as capital requirements and cross-border liquidity – this was just a fairly mild request that we should wait for that – have actually been rejected. For that reason we have retabled those amendments and we would certainly ask you to support them."@en1
|
| lpv:spokenAs | |
| lpv:unclassifiedMetadata | |
| lpv:videoURI |
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples