Ladies and gentlemen,
Dear participants,

It is a great pleasure to welcome you to this Training Course on Goods Schedules for WTO Accession. I am particularly happy that it is the second time that I open this course following the first one in March 2017.

Increasing the membership of the WTO has always been a priority for our organization — not as an end in itself but as a means to extend the coverage of multilateral trade rules and multilateral market access. Since the founding of the WTO in 1995, 36 new members have completed their accession processes under Article XII of the Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the WTO, bringing its membership to 164. Another 22 acceding governments are currently in the process of pursuing their negotiations to join the WTO.

The recently acceded as well as the currently acceding governments come from a richly diverse range of political, geographic, economic and cultural backgrounds. This demonstrates that the WTO membership and with it, its rights and obligations, offer benefits that clearly outweigh the adjustments efforts required to join the WTO. WTO accession is essentially an instrument of domestic reforms.

Applying for WTO membership signals the readiness of a government to undertake deep reforms; it can be a mechanism to intensify and accelerate domestic structural reforms beyond simple trade policy.  Typically, WTO accession is part of a broader structural reform package and not its cause. Many newly acceded members have used the accession process to promote domestic reform and modernization, and to attract foreign direct investment.    

Overall, Article XII members have consistently registered rapid trade growth above the world average. In the period from 1995 to 2017, the nominal value of trade in merchandise goods and commercial services of Article XII members has increased by 686% and 687%, respectively. This is faster than the increase in the nominal value of global trade in goods and services, which in comparison has increased by 242% and 337%, respectively. Even if China, a major contributor to world trade, is excluded from the calculations, this trend persists.

When a new country goes through the process of integrating into the multilateral trading system, we see tariffs lowered, market access increased and the principles of non-discrimination, transparency and predictability extended. The multilateral trading system benefits from each completed accession, as it is the WTO's objective to achieve universality in terms of its membership.

As you all know, WTO accessions are complex, and therefore time intensive — the average process lasts over ten years, and some of you come from governments who have pursued accessions for periods in excess of this time. 

Trade in goods has been the foundation of most trade negotiations and is the most visible part of any trade relationship. Managing the market access negotiations on goods based on a list of 5,000-10,000 product items, keeping them consistent with the HS coding system, negotiating all or selected items of this list with a good number of WTO members (10-60) over a number of years and, last but not least, keeping track of one's own positions, regional commitments and already signed bilaterals is clearly a challenging task even for some of the biggest economies.   

To facilitate the process, the WTO Secretariat has been providing technical support to acceding governments in their accession negotiations. To consolidate further this training effort, two years ago, we decided to develop this specialized in-depth training course on trade in goods scheduling for WTO acceding governments. Today's course is the 2nd edition of this.    

The course's main objective is to enhance participants' understanding of the procedural aspects of the negotiation process as well as the technical aspects of the work involved. The course will cover:

• the legal framework of this topic under the WTO agreements
• preparing the initial offer and HS consistency
• consolidation of the completed bilaterals into the final schedule and
• an active set of simulation sessions.

I know that some of these technical aspects are not always well understood but they need to be mastered if you want to conclude these negotiations successfully. The responsibility of understanding the complexities of the accession rests with the acceding government. Once you are convinced about the potential benefits of WTO membership, you need to accept that there are no shortcuts to accession and that the process involves many years of demanding team work in bilateral negotiations with WTO members as well as in convincing and getting support from your own domestic constituencies for the required structural changes and reforms that need to be introduced.

We hope that this course will enhance your governments' ability and confidence to engage in the accession process on the basis of better information, more transparency and improved technical skills.

The course will allow for interaction not only between yourselves but also with your negotiating partners and recently acceded members. I am very pleased to see that the organizers of this course have invited very senior and experienced former WTO staff as resource persons, covering the WTO member's as well as the acceding government's perspective, and also some members to share their experiences under the Round Table format.  Their experiences as well as the Secretariat's presentations will be a unique opportunity to get well prepared for the goods scheduling part of the accession process. I am also sure that you will enjoy the simulation sessions that always get intense as in real life.

In closing, I would like to underline that the WTO Secretariat is ready to assist in any requests which the acceding governments may have. I have learned that there are side-meetings already being scheduled for each one of you. I really welcome this tailor-made approach and hope that you will all maximize this opportunity.

I wish you a very successful and thought-provoking week here in Geneva and declare the training course open.

Thank you very much.