Does WTO financial negotiation promote foreign banks’ expansion in developing countries?

Abstract

After the end of WTO financial services negotiations in 1997, only a minority of literatures made its assessment and analysis on the outcome of such negotiations. Dobson and Jacquet pointed out that although many countries had improved their offers over the course of the negotiations, it told little about the degree of market access thus achieved. “There is no single indicator of market access that could help to rank countries on a single scale according to existing barriers so that the corresponding contribution of the Financial Service Agreement in removing partly or totally some of these barriers could be judged.” They compared a part of commitments with the corresponding actual regulatory policies of financial sectors in 11 countries, and concluded that only two countries were more open in their commitments than their actual policies, and eight countries remained unchanged. Thus they concluded "the actual liberalization in the banking sector does not seem to have happened."