1  INTRODUCTIOn

1.1.  Government assistance for individual economic activities may be granted in many different forms and for a variety of purposes. Responding to a request by the Working Party on GATS Rules (WPGR), this Note presents some empirical evidence of subsidy programmes for services sectors, based on information contained in WTO Trade Policy Review (TPR) reports by the Secretariat.^[1] It includes the same content as the Secretariat Background Note of the same name of 18 March 2013 (S/WPGR/W/25/Add.6). The only difference in the current Addendum is that, as demanded by Members, the information on subsidy measures and programmes in Annex 2 is presented for, and structured according to, individual services sectors. For that purpose, 18 "sectors" or "sub-sectors" have been identified, which are also repeated in the overview table (Table 1). They do not follow any particular classification system, but rather arose from the evidence gathered from the TPR reports. The 18 sectors/subsectors are: 1. Tourism and travel related services; 2. Unspecified and/or intermodal transport services, and services auxiliary to all modes of transport (such as storage and warehouse services, freight transport agency services, logistics, etc.); 3. Maritime transport services; 4. Air transport services; 5. Road transport services (including public transport services); 6. Rail transport services; 7. Financial services; 8. Software development services, information and communication technologies related services (ICT), data processing services and telephone call centre services; 9. Research and development (R&D) services; 10. Educational services; 11. Health related services; 12. Construction and related engineering services;
13. Recreational, cultural and sporting services (including betting and gambling services);
14. Telecommunication services; 15. Audiovisual services; 16. Distribution services (commission agents', wholesale trade or retailing services), trade and import/export services; 17. Real estate services; 18. Energy related services and other utilities related services; 19. Other or unspecified services.

1.2.  As was the case for Note S/WPGR/W/25/Add.6, the present document supplements the information provided in the Secretariat Background Note S/WPGR/W/25 (issued in January 1998) including its Addendums 1 to 5, and should thus be read in conjunction with them. It covers 45 Trade Policy Reviews carried out from April 2007 to the end of 2009. For those Members for which a more recent TPR existed, the latest version was used. This was the case in nine instances, namely for: China, the European Union, India, Japan, Norway, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, Turkey and the United States (see also the first paragraph in
Annex 2). New information based on the TPR reports reviewed has been added, in italics and colour, in the overview table already contained in the previous versions of the Note (Table 1).