The European Union’s negotiations for a Free Trade Agreement with Korea carry great potential for exports of UK services. Financial services businesses and related professions and services in the City of London and the United Kingdom as a whole look forward to an Agreement being signed. International Financial Services London (IFSL) sees good prospects of the Agreement being signed in the next few weeks, and welcomes the progress that has been made.
John Cooke, Chairman of IFSL’s Liberalisation of Trade in Services (LOTIS) Committee said:
“At this juncture, with the first contraction in world trade for many years, it is all the more important that trade-expanding agreements of this kind should be negotiated and brought into effect, alongside renewed efforts towards the goal of multilateral liberalisation in the WTO framework. IFSL has been extremely disappointed to hear news of certain European manufacturing interests expressing public opposition to the EU-Korea negotiations and suggesting that they should be suspended. We at IFSL would be wholly against this. Not only would it be commercially wrong to abandon or slow down the negotiations; it would also send a signal that the European Union was ready to turn away from opportunities (covering both goods and services) that have been hard won and are now on offer. That would be a huge mistake, at the very moment when trade negotiators should be doing their utmost to advance the cause of maintaining and expanding global trade,”
IFSL takes the view that the EU needs to maintain its stance in moving steadily towards the conclusion of the EU-Korea Free Trade Agreement. To do so is not only important in itself for the advantages that will accrue to EU exporters of goods and services: it will also be an important signal of the European Union’s continuing determination to meet the objectives set out in the G20 Declaration of November last year by working for trade liberalisation and against any recrudescence of protectionism.
Background
The EU-Korea negotiations for a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) form part of the EU’s Global Europe Strategy announced in October 2006. Negotiations are now nearing completion.
