The Revision of the WTO Agreement on Government Procurement : To What Extent Might it Contribute to the Expansion of Current Membership?

The WTO Government Procurement Agreement signed on 1994 (GPA 1994) is currently undertaking a revision as provided for by Art.XXIV:7(b) and (c), intended to improve and simplify the Agreement, expand its coverage and eliminate discriminatory measures and practices. Underlying such review is the aim of making the Agreement more accessible for WTO Members which are still not parties to the GPA 1994,1 through the creation of incentives for the expansion of membership of the Agreement. Since most parties to the GPA 1994 are developed countries and expansion of membership requires that the Agreement become more accessible to non-parties, that is to say, a high percentage of developing countries, this paper will analyse the Agreement from this perspective. It will assess some of the reasons why developing countries have not demonstrated interest in joining the Agreement, as well as whether the current efforts undertaken for the substantial revision of the GPA will effectively facilitate adhesion of other WTO Members to the Agreement. The purpose of this paper is to identify the gaps and flaws existing in the GPA 1994 that have caused most developing countries to refrain from acceding to it; to evaluate whether the existing problems have been addressed by the revised GPA, which issues still remain and to which extent, in order to assess whether it is likely to achieve the goal of increasing membership to the Agreement. For this purpose, the second section shows that limited membership has been an issue in the GPA from its early days; in the third section, reference is made to the composition of current membership to the GPA 1994; and, in the fourth section, there is reference to initiatives outside the scope of the WTO that led countries to adopt domestic procurement reforms even if they did not accede to the GPA. Section five takes this fact as a parameter in analysing the reasons why those same countries do not wish to join the GPA 1994. Section six takes the previous analysis into account to assess how and whether the existing flaws and gaps in the GPA 1994 that discourage developing countries from acceding to the Agreement have been successfully addressed by the revised GPA. Section seven complements this analysis by verifying that there still remains a lack of incentives in the GPA, both in the current and revised versions, to promote the aimed increase of membership. Finally, some suggestions are made