Assessment of the New Ethiopian Investment Law in Light to Ethiopia’s Accession to the WTO: The Case of the Air Transport Sector
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Date
2001-09
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AAU
Abstract
Air transport is regulated by the Chicago Convention, ICAO, and IATA, other regional and
international arrangements. It is also governed by countries’ Bilateral Air Services Agreements
(BASAs). The WTO, although it excludes the air transportation in general, it included some subservices
(MRO, the selling and marketing of air transport services and CRS) in its AATS. To clarify
the exact scope of the AATS and to check-up the interest of members regarding the continuity of
current exclusion of “traffic rights and services directly related to the exercise of traffic rights”
the Council of Trade in Services reviewed the AATS twice: first review (2000 - 2003) and second
review (2005 - present) though it is not successful yet. Ethiopia formally submitted its formal
request for WTO accession in January 2003 through the accession process was stagnant for about
eight years until the current Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed (PhD), came to power with some changes
to the previous investment policy and resumed the accession process in June 2019. The New
Investment Law has made many changes to the air transport sector: lifting the 50 passengers’
aircraft seating capacity in the previous investment law and made a new partial liberalization of
the international air transport service and domestic air transport service, but the travel agency,
travel ticket sales and MRO are reserved for domestic investors. To this end, the researcher has
assessed the new investment law considering Ethiopia's WTO accession using qualitative and
descriptive methodology. In contrast to the AATS, the New Investment Law is as restrictive as the
previous Ethiopian investment law though it has partly liberalized the major service of the air
transport. Thus, the researcher concluded that the air transportation under the New Investment
Law could be a challenging issue to Ethiopia's negotiation team to the WTO. Finally, the
researcher provided some recommendations to be taken by the Ethiopian negotiation team, by the
Ethiopian legislation and the WTO.
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Keywords
World Trade Organization (WTO), Accession, Ethiopia, Investment Law, Liberalization, Air Transportation