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Seminar objectives and organisation:
Parliamentarians have a key role to play in helping governments and societies maximise the benefits of globalisation and minimise the drawbacks. The service sector is the largest producer of jobs, and providing the best possible climate for services to continue to grow and prosper is an important factor in addressing the challenges of globalisation.
The objectives of the seminar will be to:
- share with parliamentarians the OECD’s work on growth in services;
- listen to parliamentarians’ views on how to implement the policy recommendations and reforms necessary to stimulate growth in services;
- seek parliamentarians’ support for building the political will and momentum to carry out the necessary reforms.
Background
In May 2003, the Ministerial council asked the OECD to analyse the contribution made by the services sector to employment growth, productivity and innovation, and to identify factors, institutions and policies that could enhance the growth prospects of this sector. An OECD report, ”Growth in services – Fostering employment, productivity and innovation" draws the main policy conclusions from the project.
The high-level Parliamentary Seminar will cover such issues as innovation and productivity in the services sector and the need to facilitate use of new technologies; the benefits of opening both domestic and international markets to trade and investment in services and the implications for developing countries; the need to reform labour markets and adopt structural policies favourable to growth of services.
Further regulatory reform of services markets will create new opportunities for firms to develop new services and increase employment. It will also increase the incentives for companies to innovate and improve productivity growth. Opening service markets implies reducing the degree of public ownership in competitive services, addressing anti-competitive practices in professional services and reducing barriers to entrepreneurship.
Labour and social policies are essential to help OECD economies adjust to globalization, structural change and the shift to services. Policy makers should address the high labour taxes that affect the job prospects for low-skilled workers and employment protection legislation should be reformed in countries where it is overly strict.
Innovation policies remain ill adapted to the growing importance of innovation in services and to the new potential for product and process innovation that is due to information and communications technology. How can existing public R&D better address the needs of the services sector to improve the links between services sector firms and public research?
Countries gain from more open services trade in ways which are similar to trade liberalisation in goods. However, services have a number of distinctive features that need to be taken into account when discussing trade liberalization and its impact on developing countries. According to some studies, gains from services liberalization could exceed those from goods liberalization in some studies by up to a factor of five.
Developing countries have a clear comparative advantage in labour-intensive services (construction services, data processing), including at the higher-skilled end of the chain. Technological advances in telecommunication and computer industries have allowed developing countries endowed with a well-educated and cost-competitive workforce to produce and export computer and related services worldwide.
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