Introduction

The importance of logistics services in both the national and global economy is widely recognized and increasingly more apparent. From the trade perspective, the role of logistics services is twofold: it facilitates the international flow of goods and thus provides key support to trade in goods and global supply chains; and, at the same time, it generates trade flow in its own right and constitutes an important industry in many economies. The significance of logistics services has also been underlined in trade negotiations. In 2004, for the first time in trade negotiations, a group of World Trade Organization (WTO) members advocated considering logistics services as a distinct sector. They defined logistics services as dealing ‘with the supply chain process that plans, implements, and controls the efficient and effective point-to-point flow and storage of goods, services and related information, throughout the production, distribution and delivery stages, from the initial suppliers of inputs to final customers of products’. Without ambition to change the current General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) classification system, which does not contain a separate category for logistics services, this group of WTO members take a pragmatic checklist approach, encouraging trading partners to undertake commercially meaningful liberalization commitments on all logistics-related sectors. The proposed checklist is very broad, containing about twenty services subsectors which are regrouped into three blocks: core freight logistics; related freight logistics; and non-core freight logistics. Identified core freight logistics services include cargo handling, storage and warehousing, transport agency and other auxiliary services to transport.