Talking about services

Chan Wai-kwan

A conference on WTO, GATS, MFN and stuff like that is guaranteed to put Hong Kong people to sleep. Yet 700 people from 53 countries gathered in Atlanta on 31 October, just to talk precisely that – WTO, MFN and GATS. And they talked about these for three full days. What is more, they were joined by a team of 24 from Hong Kong who travelled half the globe for that event. Most of the Hong Kong delegates being complete WTO-illiterates, it was no small feat for the host, the US Coalition of Service Industries, to keep them interested but miraculously, the Hong Kong team were still in happy mood after the Congress closed on 3 November.

And they had good reasons to feel happy. Not only have they learnt a lot more about negotiating horizontal pro-competitive regulatory reform and the like, they have also taken part in a great conference.

Before the Congress was held, however, a host of factors had militated against its success. For a start, it was not held with the best of timing. The Ministerial Conference of the WTO was only four weeks away, and many overseas delegates were reluctant to make a trip to the US twice. And getting business people together to talk trade policy is intrinsically difficult. That is why, when earlier the organiser presented the Congress as a 2,000 people event, few people believed them. They never achieved anything close to that number although, to be fair, a 700 people conference was still a pretty big event.

Nor did the Congress deliver the “high-level dignatories” as advertised, with names like Vice President Al Gore remaining merely names on the invited list. It could be said that Fidel Ramos, former President of the Philippines who graced the Congress with his presence, was a senior international statesman but it was not unreasonable for participants to expect someone more senior than Deputy US Trade Representative Richard Fisher from the host side. But that did not seem to have dampened the spirit of the senior corporate CEOs and executives who attended the Congress. Perhaps the deliverable of the Congress – the substantive discussions and recommendations which are taken very seriously by the WTO and by trade officials – proved to be more important that what heavyweight the Congress delivered, or rather failed to. President Ramos himself was so engrossed in the Congress that he stayed from the beginning to the end and actually took part himself in quite a few breakout sessions.

Indeed, it was the substance of the Congress which differentiated it from other happy get-togethers. President Ramos himself provided some sparks by mentioning, in his luncheon speech to the Congress, how liberalisation managed to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, only faster. He was evidently pro-liberalisation himself, but his message of the need for sensitivity towards less developed countries was a welcome reminder to the predominantly western audience.

And sparks flew from the very first session. After the keynote speech from Richard Fisher who championed the US line of a Seattle Ministerial just on services and agriculture, with a little environmental and labour agenda thrown in, the Japanese ambassador Tatsuo Arima responded, in highly diplomatic language, with a different message which could be regarded, depending on one’s point of view, as a different perspective from or a rebuttal of the American position.

In terms of substance it was perhaps the plenary on the second day that was the most rewarding for the Hong Kong trade policy novice. It was organised in the form of a reporting back session for the breakout groups known as “business policy forums”. The panel included fourteen private sector representatives, all of them chairmen of the various breakout sessions; as well as 5 government officials. The latter included a representative each from Japan, US, EC, Australia and Hong Kong’s Stuart Harbinson. The Chairman of the plenary was Roberto de Ocampo, a senior advisor to Arthur Andersen and a former finance minister of the Philippines. The private sector panelists each gave a brief report of the recommendations from their own forums. The topics were wide ranging, from popular subjects like electronic commerce to more exotic ones such as ageing and the WTO.

The session took two full hours. During that time one delegate – me – went in and out of the Conference hall several times, but to my slight embarrassment, I seemed to be the only one. The hundreds of attendees just sat there, listening, taking notes and asking questions. And that included our own Hong Kong delegation. I imagined that if we had held a conference in Hong Kong on the same theme, half of the audience would have gone by the first half hour. In the end, of course, it was the substance of the session that kept the people there. The concensus was that the session has been extremely fruitful and informative.

Behind the success of the plenary were the “meat” of the Congress, the 55 individual seminars organised in six concurrent breakout sessions, with more than 200 panelists deliberating on 102 prepared papers. The organisers had the good sense to compile the papers into a CD Rom, with a short summary of each published in the Congress programme.

Because each breakout session consisted of about nine groups, attendance in the breakout groups was much smaller, perhaps in the 20-30 range. A few popular groups drew upwards of 60 people, while the smallest groups had about 10 people. They seminars were divided into four categories, namely, academic, government, business opportunity, and business policy. It was perhaps the lively discussions within these groups that gave the Congress its defining character.

Although Hong Kong people are not known for being great debaters in international conferences, on this occasion the Hong Kong delegates took more than an active part, with eleven of them acting in various roles as panelists or chairmen. The Hong Kong team as a whole earned a lot of respect; among them the government’s Stuart Harbinson had been particularly impressive. In his own relaxed and articulate manner, he showed what it took to be a great trade negotiator. The Chairman of the WTO’s Council for Trade in Services is no small job but Stuart demonstrated why he was the right man for the job and how Hong Kong could contribute positively to the WTO even though we are such a small player..

Many Congress delegates will remember Stuart for another reason. He was the host of the reception on Monday night, and that was a great reception. Courtesy of the SAR government, Hong Kong was the sponsor of the event and with the help of the Trade Development Council and the Hong Kong Tourist Association, we put up a show that did us proud. It was in fact no monumental task, just a video, a few exhibition panels marketing Hong Kong’s new airport, cyberport, business centre and, yes, countryside, plus two Chinese musicians we flew from Los Angeles to play Erhu. But these little things impressed people. And a little soothing Erhu seemed to have worked magic on 500 minds which were crammed with thoughts like regulatory transparency after a full day’s discussion. And it did magic to Hong Kong’s image too. That Stuart was able to announce the Disney deal on that night, coinciding with Chief Executive Mr Tung’s announcement in Hong Kong, added further excitement to the reception.

In terms of presentation, our reception outshone event the official Congress Dinner which was held on Tuesday night. It was to feature WTO Director General Mike Moore but since Seattle had to have priority for the WTO, we had to contend with less rather than Moore. But Moore did make his presence through a video, in which he said, I believe truthfully, that he would rather have been in Atlanta than Geneva. It was left to WTO Director for Services David Hartridge to answer questions on his behalf.

No doubt the Congress Dinner was a different event from the reception, but I believe it is the reception which will linger in the mind. It also showed that in the right forum, in this case a trade policy congress, a little effort in promotion would generate big payoffs.

Another of Hong Kong’s successful promotional effort was to have staged several booths in the “Global Services Marketplace”, the Congress’ associated exhibition. The exhibition was modest in scale, featuring 41 exhibitors. Among them Hong Kong’s stand was the most impressive. The TDC which designed, constructed and manned the booths assured me that these were not the most difficult or sophisticated jobs they had done. They were polite. It might have been a piece of cake to them, but it made Hong Kong shine amongst other exhibitors. It also made me appreciate truly the world class standards of the TDC and the HKTA. It was evidence again that it was possible to leverage our promotional efforts by investing only a little and impressing hundreds of senior people about Hong Kong.

But Hong Kong’s promotion was not all successful. We planned a “Hong Kong forum” as one of the 55 breakout seminars. It turned out that people remembered the reception, enjoyed the exhibition booth, but prefer to go to a discussion on “impact of regional service sector negotiations on GATS” rather than “Hong Kong: headquartering your services business in Asia’s services centre”. We managed to attract 25 people, two thirds of whom were the home team. Coming after the huge success of the reception, that forum was particularly disappointing. Thankfully it was only a minor part of our whole promotional effort.

In hindsight we were reminded of a view which we ourselves often make, namely, that in promoting services a lot of imagination will be needed. The hard-sell approach with a simplistic “come to great Hong Kong” message will not suffice in attracting the attention of the more sophisticated service sector professionals. After giving full credits to TDC, HKTA and ourselves, we just had to work harder still.

Not that we have not worked hard enough during the Congress. As with many other large scale events, a number of “fringe meetings” had been organised. The most important of these was probably the meeting of the Global Services Network. Though an informal group, the GSN was like the coalition of coalitions of service industries. It never had any legal status but its views were taken seriously by the WTO and by trade officials. It is not difficult to understand why, considering the meticulous way in which its discussion was organised. The GSN meeting itself was held at 4:00pm on the day before the Congress. An hour before the fifty participants met, a smaller “contact group” of about twenty people gathered to discuss the agenda. Before that, an even smaller “insider group” held a lunch meeting to prepare for the agenda. When the real meeting came the GSN had relatively little difficulty in agreeing to an important statement on the Seattle Ministerial. I managed to join all these meetings so my mind was full of acronyms much earlier than my colleagues from Hong Kong.

Another important fringe meeting was that of the “Financial Leaders Group”, an influential lobby group coordinated by the USCSI and chaired by Barclay’s Bank Chairman Andrew Buxton. Hong Kong fielded one of its best economists KC Kwok to the meeting.

With the help of the Hong Kong Tourist Association, Hong Kong delegation leader Stanley Ko and other members gave some ten interviews to local media reporters. HKCSI Vice Chairman KC Kwok also took the opportunity to compose what was later to become Standard Chartered Bank’s analysis on the Disney deal. The full Hong Kong team also attended another promotional dinner arranged by the Hong Kong Association in Atlanta and hosted by Raymond Fan, Director of the SAR New York Office.

We were able to do these because Hong Kong had been provided with a comfortable hospitality suite, in return for our sponsorship of the Congress. The suite became generally a “headquarter”, a working and resting lounge for the Hong Kong delegates But that was not before the twenty of us spent an enjoyable evening there having dinner served in the suite and sponsored by Stanley Ko.

My own sense is that the Hong Kong delegates generally felt good about attending the Congress. Quite a few of us were interested, even enthusiastic, in bidding for the next Congress to be held in Hong Kong. One important reason for the success of the Hong Kong delegation has been the cooperation by “Hong Kong Inc.”, the partnership of different sectors of the business community, and the generous sponsorship by the SAR government. More of the same?

(Ends)