Local Equity Requirements

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Member States were given days to notify WTO of any existing nonconforming measures
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Pakistan was one of the countries that notified investment measures under the agreement. Following Pakistan’s request, the initial five-year transition period was further extended to December 2002. During that time, Pakistan made an effort to eliminate all remaining TRIMs. About 85 percent of the measures covered by the so-called deletion programmes had been abolished by then, Pakistan request fora further extension, mainly in response to the automotive sector’s demands, was turned down by the WTO. On the domestic front Pakistan had been following the indigenisation policy in engineering industries through the stakeholder agreed deletion programmes since Up to 1995, the deletion cell of Ministry of Industry and Production (MoIP) was formulating and monitoring the deletion programmes
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.In 1995, the Government setup the Engineering Development Board for providing policy direction and impetus for growth of the engineering sector. The Board used an integrated approach by focusing on the overall development of all the subsectors of the engineering industry and acted as abridge between the Government and the entrepreneurs/investors to ensure achievement of set objectives. The Board principally agreed to remove all the TRIMs in industry generally to make it more competitive, and recommended a plan to phaseout the deletion programmes by 2000. Slow implementation stretched the plan slightly and the programmes in products were phased out from the purview of deletion policy between 30 June 2002 and December 2003. Since then, there is no deletion programme for the engineering industry. However, in 2003 the Board setup the Industry Specific Deletion Programme for the Automobile Industry consisting of 18 components, and the targets achieved at that time were as follows

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