UK’s other Brexit fight may bar it from $1.7trn WTO deal

Bloomberg

UK businesses stand to lose access to a $1.7 trillion public procurement market if signatories to a World Trade Organization (WTO) accord this week block Britain’s application for membership, which will lapse after it leaves the European Union in March.
On November 27, the UK will seek admission to the 46-nation Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) in Geneva. Failure to rejoin the pact could prevent UK companies from bidding on government contracts in member nations, including the $837 billion US market. Each member has the power to block admittance.
“Going through an accession does mean in theory a country — any country — can veto,” the UK Ambassador to the WTO Julian Braithwaite told lawmakers in London this month. “If we don’t get their agreement we don’t become a member of the GPA.”
A half dozen nations including the US and Japan had blocked a UK application last month, with some saying the British offer was based on a set of outdated as well as incomplete commitments.
While all members want to retain access to the UK’s 67 billion-pound ($76 billion) marketplace, they’re still willing to use the opportunity to squeeze some concessions, with some of them eying projects such as Britain’s high-speed railways or a Heathrow airport expansion.
REJECTED BID
The purpose of the GPA is to open up, in a reciprocal manner, government procurement markets to foreign competition, and help make public purchasing more transparent among the GPA’s members.
British officials argue that the UK should receive expedited approval to the accord because it’s already a GPA member by virtue of its status in the EU, and can simply replicate its current commitments without upsetting any trade partners.
But last month, members rejected a separate UK bid, with some saying the application simply replicated the terms of the EU’s 2004 GPA. They said the offer didn’t take into account British agencies that have emerged since 2004, like the Department for International Trade and the Department for Exiting the European Union.
Braithwaite said the UK has offered to accommodate American demands by revising its schedule — but only after the US agrees to let the UK rejoin the pact.

MOLDOVA’S BLOCK
A spokeswoman for the office of the US Trade Representative said more information on the US position will be made available in the coming days. Braithwaite told parliamentarians that if the US accepts Britain’s offer it would “change the dynamic quite significantly” for other opponents of the UK GPA bid — which includes Canada, Israel, Japan, Moldova, New Zealand, South Korea, and Ukraine.
But the UK will have to contend with the demands of 45 other nations aside from the US Moldova, for one, has said that it’s concerned that the UK has a “burdensome visa application process” that doesn’t allow Moldova’s citizens to partake in the same reciprocal benefits from market access in the GPA, according to an October 17 statement delivered to the GPA committee by the Moldovan delegation.
Braithwaite said that if the UK were to lose access to the accord it might only affect about 800 million pounds worth of annual procurement opportunities for local companies. But in Braithwaite’s comments to Parliament, he seemed sanguine that a resolution could be reached.
“They are not going to want to have a situation where their access to this valuable market is called into question,” Braithwaite said to lawmakers. “Now that doesn’t mean everything will come together magically in time,” he said. “There are risks, clearly. But there are a lot of interests towards maintaining the status quo.”