Preferential Trade Agreements and Trade Liberalization Efforts in the OIC Member States
With Special Emphasis on the TPS-OIC
104
Table 15: ASEAN Services Commitments compared to GATS/DDA Commitments (index is such
that higher value implies more services commitments)
Brunei Indonesia Malaysia Philippines Singapore Thailand VietNam
GATS 7.99 17.26 27.47 16.41 37.59 19.39 34.18
AFAS 30.78 41.58 43.39 34.95 42.03 37.86 38.27
Source: Extracted from the WTO Dataset of services commitments in regional trade agreements
(RTAs)
Note: The index score is on scale of 0-100 for each sector, with 100 representing full commitments (without
limitations) across all relevant sub-sectors. GATS reflects the index value for both GATS commitments and
services offer in the ongoing Doha Development Agenda. The index value is for both mode 1 (cross-border
trade) and mode 3 (commercial presence). The AFAS commitments considered in this table are those of the
7th package; the 8th package might have increased the index value for some countries.
Tariff reduction schedules are country specific. Some tariff reductions were completed by
2006 (so-called early harvest programme). Around 90% of all tariff lines are covered by the so-
called Normal track and they were gradually eliminated by 2010 in China and OIC ASEAN
members. Tariffs for products included in the sensitive list (100-400 products at the HS6 digit
level, depending on the country) are to be reduced to maximum 5% by 2018. Tariffs for prod-
ucts put on the highly sensitive list are to be cut at least by half by 2018. As an illustration, in
the case of Malaysia’s imports from China, tariff cuts for the majority of products in the
sensitive list are to be reduced to 5% only in 2018 with minimal or no cuts before that date.
The list contains products such as cement, some chemical products and materials, several
plastic and rubber products (including e.g. tyres), plywood, cotton and other yarn and fabrics,
various iron and steel products, certain machines and vehicles, including various motor
vehicles.
Table 16 below shows that China provides substantial preference margin to imports from
ASEAN with 2010 average applied rate almost 9 percentage points below China’s MFN rate.
Brunei Darussalam has particularly low average MFN tariffs, but in the case of Indonesia and
Malaysia preference margins granted to China are likely to be substantial, up to 6% point, on
average (i.e. bounded by average MFN applied rate by these countries).