ABSTRACT
One main innovation of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) was that, unlike its predecessor the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GATT), it took a much broader view of trade, and in particular, introduced new and important issues to trade negotiations. The main new issues included trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPS), trade-related investment measures (TRIMS), and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). 1 The provisions regarding trade in financial services, which are an integral element of the GATS, have proved to be a source of considerable anxiety for the nonindustrialised countries generally. This concern arises, in part, because the consequences of the GATS are not well understood and there is a sense among these countries that they are being pressurised into signing-up for something which may yet turn out to be to their detriment. There is some literature on the potential effects of the GATS on developing countries (see for example Murinde and Ryan, 1999). However, the African countries which are the subject of this chapter are somewhat special. African countries have concerns which differ considerably from the bulk of the emerging and developing nations (see Mahdi, 2000). Most of the economies in Africa are heavily dependant on oil imports and are largely vulnerable to exogenous shocks from the rest of the world. A few of the countries which are oil exporting, such as Nigeria, are acutely aware of the exhaustibility of their primary source of wealth but are unfortunately neither seeking to diversify their economies at home nor building up a suitable portfolio of interests abroad as a safeguard against future diminishing oil revenues. As argued elsewhere in this book (for example, the chapters by Bende-Nabende, Mahdi and Mwencha), the African
