The status of public services is one of the most hotly debated issues surrounding the GATS. There are two approaches to distinguish such services from any other services: an institutional approach that focuses on the legal and institutional conditions governing supply (e.g. ownership status,...

There has been virtually no liberalization under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) to date. Most existing commitments are confined to guaranteeing the levels of access that existed in the mid-1990s, when the Agreement entered into force, in a limited number of sectors. The only...

This paper deals with claims, recently raised in various circles, that structural faults in the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) have prevented WTO Members from advancing services liberalization under the Agreement. The GATS is generally associated in this context with a bottom-up...

After the Uruguay Round, negotiations under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) continued in several rule-making areas, including emergency safeguards and subsidies. However, there has been little progress to date. The negotiations on safeguards appear to have suffered from a...

The status of public services is one of the most hotly debated issues surrounding the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). In principle, there are two approaches to define such services: an institutional approach focusing on the conditions governing supply (e.g. ownership status and...

There are essentially two types of plurilateral trade agreements (PAs) among WTO Members, an exclusive and an open variant. While the benefits of the former agreements are shared among participants only, the latter are implemented on an MFN-basis, thus profiting non-signatories as well. The most...

In most of the current literature, the spread of regionalism in international trade relations is discussed in terms of a rapidly rising number of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Far less attention is given to the even more rapid proliferation of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) and...