At the same time, the opening up of flexibility for developing countries in the current proposal, in line with ITUC demands, is welcome. However, the levels previously proposed, whereby a country could have either exempted 5% of products fully, or specified 10% of products that would receive lower tariff reductions, should be set as minimums to avoid the risk that flexibilities could be negotiated further downward.
Finally, the ITUC insists that developing countries be allowed to increase their levels of flexibility in the future when justified by their social and employment needs, something that should have been included in the current proposals. In this way, developing countries would have at least some scope to deal with negative impacts of an eventual WTO agreement.
International Trade Union Confederation
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