Introduction

This chapter analyses the special and differential treatment (‘S&D’) provisions and other special measures for developing countries contained in the WTO Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA), with reference to both the existing and the revised GPA texts. As discussed in previous chapters of this volume, the GPA is currently being renegotiated, with the most significant achievement to date being the Parties' provisional agreement on a revised text. In the renegotiation of the text, the S&D provisions of the GPA have been extensively revised and the Parties to the Agreement have made it clear that they attach much importance to these provisions, in particular as a basis for facilitating accessions to the Agreement by new developing country Parties. Hence, an assessment of the new as compared to the existing S&D provisions is an important element of an overall examination of the revision of the GPA as a whole.

S&D provisions are, of course, a feature of virtually all WTO Agreements. In assessing the S&D provisions of the GPA, it is important to consider the general role of S&D in the WTO in addition to its specific relevance with respect to government procurement. The Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization (also known as ‘the WTO Agreement’) in its preamble cites sustainable economic development as one of the objectives of the WTO. It also specifies that international trade should benefit the economic development of developing and least developed countries.