The GPA is a plurilateral agreement within the WTO, which means that not all WTO members are parties to the agreement. Currently, the Agreement has 20 Contracting Parties composed of 48 WTO Members. 36 WTO members/observers participate as observers in the GPA Committee. Of these, 12 members are in the process of acceding to the agreement. The agreement was revised in March 2012 and also expanded the supply it covers. It entered into force on 6 April 2014 after the two-thirds acceptance threshold for the parties had been reached on 7 March 2014. It has no expiration date. In accordance with Article V of the revised GPA, special and differential treatment for developing countries may be negotiated in the form of transitional measures such as countervailing measures, preferential price programmes, initially higher thresholds and the gradual introduction of facilities by a developing country in the accession process, subject to the agreement of the other Parties and the development needs of the acceding Member. Surrogacy applies to procurement by all contractual means, including purchase, leasing or leasing with or without a purchase option. It applies to entities listed by each signatory country in Annex I (off-site link) to the agreement. Annex 1 of Appendix I lists the central government agencies covered, Annex 2 lists the agencies of the sub-central government and Annex 3 lists the other agencies. The current signatories of this agreement (as of April 2014) are: Armenia, Canada, Chinese Taipei, the European Union – whose Member States are Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands (including Aruba), Poland, Portugal, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden and the United Kingdom – Hong Kong, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Norway, South Korea, Liechtenstein, Singapore, Switzerland and the United States.
Any other government of the Member States of the WTO may accede to this Agreement on the terms agreed upon by that government and the present signatories. The Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA), originally negotiated during the Tokyo Round, was renegotiated for the second time in the Uruguay Round. It is one of the so-called plurilateral agreements of the WTO, since its disciplines apply only to WTO Members that have signed it. Unlike most other Tokyo Round codes – e.B agreements on technical barriers to trade (standards), import licensing, customs value, subsidies and anti-dumping – the GPA could not be “multilateralized”. With the reintroduction of agriculture and the textile and clothing industry into the GATT, government procurement has thus become the biggest “gap” in the scope of the GATT. International intergovernmental organizations are granted observer status in the GPA Committee The GPA contains a number of provisions to ensure that public procurement tendering procedures in signatory countries are transparent, efficient and fair. As a result, the first agreement on government procurement (the Tokyo Round Government Procurement Code) was signed in 1979 and entered into force in 1981. It was amended in 1987 and entered into force in 1988.
The parties to the agreement then conducted negotiations in parallel with the Uruguay Round on the extension of the scope and scope of the agreement. Finally, on 15 April 1994, a new Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA 1994) was signed in Marrakesh at the same time as the Agreement Establishing the WTO, which entered into force on 1 January 1996. Signatories to the GPA are required to publish summary notices on procurement opportunities for contracts covered by the agreement. Each member has identified publications in which these opportunities are published. The publications are listed in Annex II (off-site link). The fundamental objective of the GPA is to open up public procurement between its parties. Following several rounds of negotiations, the GPA parties have opened procurement activities worth an estimated $1.7 trillion each year to international competition (i.e., to suppliers of GPA parties offering goods, services or construction services). The Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA) consists of parts covering WTO members (including the European Union and its 27 member states, as well as the United Kingdom, all of which are covered by the Agreement, as a single party). .