ASEC History and Past
Projects
The Applied Services Economic Centre (ASEC) was initiated in 1985 by the
Geneva Association’s Founding Secretary-General, Orio Giarini, who was
then concerned that not enough thought and attention was being directed to
the steady evolution of modern economies and societies from agriculture
and manufacturing towards a “services economy”, with the multiple and
varied implications which that development might imply.
ASEC was thus conceived
essentially as a lookout institution -- an “observatoire” -- which would
identify, focus and report on emerging services trends and issues and
serve to stimulate interest and wide-ranging efforts by other affected
parties. Over more than twenty years now, ASEC drawn attention and
contributed to the evolution of a continuing series of emerging services-related
trends and issues developped hereafter:
The Services and the “Services Economy” Initiative, 1985-90
The Liberalisation of Trade in Services Issue, 1988-1997 & Beyond
The Seminar Series on Rethinking the Role and Function of Services,
1999-2002
The Services and the “Services Economy” Initiative, 1985-90
Dating back to the
1970’s, Orio Giarini began articulate a set of ideas about how economies
and societies worldwide were evolving increasingly into ‘service economies’.
In advanced nations, roughly 2/3 of economic growth and employment were
already being generated by services activities of one sort or another, to
the point where services industries were starting to predominate in
economic importance vis-à-vis manufacturing or agriculture. But the real
implications of a ‘service economy’ go well beyond mere statistics.
Services are not simple units of production or goods in trade; rather,
they are closely tied up with our concepts of uncertainty/certainty, risk
and value; and with a world where services predominate in terms of
economic activity and pose a fundamental intellectual challenge both to
neoclassical economics and to conventional thinking about the operation of
modern economies and societies. Through a continuing association with the
Club of Rome
The Club of Rome , which he and his successor as Secretary-General,
Patrick Liedtke, has maintained, these ideas about services and the
‘service economy’ have come progressively to be developed and disseminated.
During the 1980s, these
ideas came to be promoted through the activities of
PROGRES, ASEC and the
Services World Forum, an early grouping of individuals with similar
concern and interests. Through annual conferences and sponsored meetings,
PROGRES and ASEC, both affiliated organizations of the
Geneva Association, brought together diverse groups of individuals
interested in various aspects of services and the “services economy” and,
in the pre-internet era, information on these activities were disseminated
through the
PROGRES Newsletter, which continues to the present day. As well, the
Services World Forum was established in 1985 as a more focused
grouping of individuals concerned about advancing the concept of services
and the “services economy”. Two edited collections resulted from this
pioneering work, i.e. The Emerging Service Economy, edited by Orio
Giarini for the Services World Forum. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1986; and
Strategic Trends in Services, an Inquiry into the Global Service Economy,
edited for the Services World Forum by A. Bressand & K. Nicolaïdes. New
York: Harper Row, 1989.
Orio Giarini has continued to play a particular role in promoting
the concept of services and a “services economy” and in linking them to
the notions of risk and uncertainty. In collaboration with Walter Stahel,
these ideas became The Limits to Certainty: Facing Risks in the New
Service Economy, which has made a significant contribution
understanding of the ‘service economy’ and which has now been published in
six languages.
Many of these basic
ideas continue to underpin the work of ASEC and have evolved further and
developed in Walter Stahel’s recent book on
The Performance Economy. Since its inception, then, ASEC’s
continuing purpose has been “to investigate developments and trends within
the evolving global service economy which deserve greater attention in
their own right and which are of broad interest to the world insurance
industry.
The Liberalisation of Trade in Services Issue, 1988-1997 & Beyond:
The 1980s also
witnessed the first real efforts to bring services within the realm of
international trade law and regulation and to liberalise trade and
investment in services markets worldwide. The GATT Uruguay Round of world
trade negotiations was begun in 1986 and, for the first time,
liberalization of trade in services emerged as a prime agenda item. ASEC,
particulary through the efforts of Russel Pipe and Brian Woodrow, played a
modest early role in encouraging and supporting those negotiations by
sponsoring a set of conferences in Geneva between 1990 and 1992 which
brought together country trade representatives, business and industry
groups, and international organization officials to frame and discuss the
key trade in services issues. (Conference
Proceedings)
When the Uruguay Round
eventually concluded in 1994 with international acceptance of the General
Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and the establishment of the World
Trade Organization (WTO), the critical sector of trade in financial
services (including insurance) remained unresolved. Between 1994 and 1997,
ASEC monitored and supported the ongoing WTO financial services
negotiations and, through the work of Brian Woodrow, then documented the
agreement eventually reached as it relates to insurance services ( Geneva
Papers articles in
1995,
1997,
2000 (vol.1)).
Since 2000, the
Geneva Association, particularly through the efforts of Julian Arkell,
has continued to follow trade in services issues (specifically those
relating to financial services) as these have proceeded within the current
WTO Doha Round of trade negotiations which,
as of summer 2008, has now been temporarily suspended. The issue of
services trade liberalization and its impact on the global financial
services industry has received attention at each of the annual PROGRES
seminars, the most recent of which took place in Geneva in April 2008. (Conference
Proceedings)
As well, Julian Arkell has recently completed
an analysis of services trade liberalization issues affecting four key
developing countries - Brazil, China, India, Mexico & Russia - which
examines the continuing
barriers to trade and investment in these emerging economies.
ASEC remains firmly committed to the view that continuing
liberalization of trade in services establishes an essential foundation
for further evolution towards a modern global services economy.
The Seminar Series on Rethinking the Role and Function of Services,
1999-2002:
By the year
2000, the concept of services and of a ‘services economy’ had become more
or less widely, though still not fully, accepted. In 1999, the first World
Services Congress took place in Atlanta, and ASEC participated directly in
this venture. At this time, it also become apparent that the notion of
services itself perhaps needed rethinking in light of ongoing
developments across services sectors and the emergence of a so-called “new
economy”. Under the direction of Patrick Liedtke and Brian Woodrow, ASEC
then initiated a sequence of invited seminars which sought to explore
different and changing aspects of Services in the New Economy.
The
1st ASEC seminar held in
Geneva in November 2000 and focused primarily on the increasing
horizontalization of services as these came to be distributed more and
more as bundled products and across traditional services sectors (summary). A
2nd ASEC seminar held in
Brussels in June 2001 then dealt with issues and trends related to
intermediation and disintermediation of services provision(summary). And finally, a
3rd ASEC Seminar took place in
Toronto in April 2002 and looked specifically at risk and
vulnerability associated with services particularly in the areas of supply
chain management and financial intermediation(summary). ASEC continues to champion
the need for a thoroughgoing rethinking of prevailing understandings of
services, how these continue to change in a changing world, and how our
globalizing world economy has become increasingly a ‘global service
economy’.
