What are “Goods Schedules”?
WTO Schedules of concessions, often referred to as “Goods Schedules” are legal instruments that describe the treatment a Member must provide to the trade in goods of other WTO Members.
They form an integral part of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the WTO Agreement.
This includes so-called “bound” or maximum duties.
They are one of the main WTO tools to ensure transparency, security, and predictability for world trade.
Goods Schedules are not static. There have been hundreds of changes since the WTO was established.
Each WTO Member has its own Schedule of Concessions on goods, which is either annexed to the Marrakesh Protocol to the GATT 1994 or to a Protocol of Accession.
Schedules are identified by a unique Roman numeral which has been assigned according to the moment in which a Member has joined the GATT or the WTO. The first one is “Schedule I (1) – Australia” and the most recent is “Schedule CLXXV (175) – European Union (28)”.
There are 136 active Schedules for the 164 WTO Members.
There are two cases of group of WTO Members sharing a common Schedule: the European Union and its member States as well as Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
Each Goods Schedule exists in one of the three WTO official languages and its content is never translated.
Each Schedule has at least four parts:
Part I – MFN concessions & maximum tariffs to goods from other Members
Part II – Preferential tariffs
Part III – Concessions on non-tariff measures
Part IV – Domestic support and export subsidies on agricultural products
What is Harmonized System of Nomenclature (HSN)?
The Goods Schedules are based on the World Customs Organization’s classification system, which catalogues traded products with specific names and numbers. This is also known as the Harmonized System of Nomenclature (HSN).
Due to the continuous emergence of new products owing to technological innovations, the HSN system is regularly updated to reflect new products, also known as ‘transposition’.
What are “bound duties” under Schedules of concessions?
All Schedules of concessions include “bound duties”, that is the maximum tariffs that can be applied by a Member for a particular product, as well as other tariff and non-tariff concessions.
