Maritime Transport Essay Example for Free

Maritime Transport Essay Hereby it is analysed that there are three different kinds of categories which have not given any offer on MTS. The first one are nations which are willing to make offers but would rather wait until the major maritime players like the US have shown their effort to make an offer. The second group are members which fail to meet to have the professional knowledge and the technical know how to deal with the possibilities of offers. The last one is composed of players in the maritime industry which are not willing to open their maritime industry at all or on a multilateral basis as they fear that this action might end up in increased international competition and therefore they rather stick to their internal policies than taking the risk to loose their power in the market place. One significant example for the last category are the US which are unwilling to include MTS in their schedule. Another issue is the one of the different interest of country groups which were already an obstacle to the former Uruguay round. On the one hand there are the developing countries, among them mainly the EU members which â€Å"are keen to go further into the inland part of the transport chain beyond the sea leg by proposing the inclusion of feeder services and multimodal transport (mainly by Japan)†. [7] On the other hand developing countries and one of the major maritime nations the US can not accept such liberalization due to a number of economic reasons whereas the most significant argument against it is the loss of jobs of domestic workers which are engaged in the shipping industry. Although there are again lots of issues to be solved in order to reach an agreement and implementation under GATS there are yet some positive signs for a positive outcome. First of all as per data available most of the offers on MTS were from developing countries which involves members of different economic positions including more developed nations like Hong Kong and Singapore but at the same time also less developed nations e. g. Albania. According to Zhang’s thesis this can have at least two positive effects.