More than one-third of the World Trade Organization-notified services trade agreements that were in effect between January 2008 and August 2015 involved at least one South or Southeast Asian trading partner. Drawing on Baier and Bergstrand's (2004) determinants of preferential trade agreements...

This article engages with the recently adopted agreement for the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) in the area of services. While services trade had heretofore stood at the queue of African trade pacts, the AfCFTA breaks new grounds by negotiating goods and services concurrently,...

The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) under the WTO is a newly-born and the first ever multilateral agreement on trade in services. Despite of potential development and welfare prospects abound in the services sector, only moderate liberalization has been achieved under the GATS and...

Given the rise of services preferentialism in the last decade and the importance of domestic regulation for services trade, this paper examines the role of regulatory incidence and convergence as determinants of services trade agreements (STAs). Our results suggest that regulation is an...

At the multilateral level, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) regulates trade in services. Considered a framework agreement, GATS contains a built-in negotiation mandate to further develop disciplines on services trade. These negotiations have, in the context of the Doha Round,...

The aim of this paper is to analyse developing countries' participation so far in the current round of services negotiations under the Doha Development Agenda. The paper analyses developing countries' negotiating positions, as evidenced by their multilateral negotiating proposals; their initial...

Distance, as a proxy for trade barriers, is found in many studies to matter even for weightless cross-border financial investments and lending, possibly due to the presence of information asymmetries. Its importance is tested in this paper using exports of all five broad categories of the...

The Pacific Islands are small, developing island states which are challenged by their small size, geographical isolation and the unvaried production possibilities. Increased trade in services, facilitated by the ICT revolution, may provide for some much needed economic development. After...

Services is the fastest-growing sector of today's global economy and trade in services is the most dynamic segment of world trade. However, its potential remains constrained by a variety of barriers: trade costs are estimated to be almost double those in goods, and more than 40% of trade costs...

Services are an important part of global economic activity and of international trade. Nevertheless, compared to its very large tourism sector, the sector of high-end business services in Thailand remains small. As IT and information, and professional services are traded indirectly through value...