Trade Liberalization in Aviation Services: Can the Doha Round Free Flight?

The air transport industry has been organized to provide services internationally for many years. It is a large and complex industry with its own intergovernmental treaties and organizations. How then will Doha Round efforts to apply the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) to aviation services fare? Can the industry be persuaded to abandon its established practices and procedures and embrace new ones? In Trade Liberalization in Aviation Services, Brian Hindley provides a strategy for liberalizing the aviation services industry. He identifies which aspects of the industry invite liberalizing efforts; assesses the potential for beneficial application of GATS principles to airfreight; and analyzes the issues raised by an attempt to apply the GATS to air transport as a whole. Hindley believes that express delivery offers the greatest opportunity for liberalization within the aviation services industry. He argues that if GATS can effectively address the difficulties facing express delivery - on customs procedures, non-tariff barriers to delivery of the service, and the issues raised by competition with public postal operators - it will establish its credentials to deal with it