This paper discusses what could be done to expand services trade and investment through a multilateral agreement in the World Trade Organization. A distinction is made between market access liberalization and the regulatory preconditions for benefiting from market opening. The authors argue that...

Trade and investment in services are inhibited by a range of policy restrictions, but the best offers so far in the Doha negotiations are on average twice as restrictive as actual policy. They will generate no additional market opening. Regulatory concerns help explain the limited progress. This...

The past few decades have witnessed a growth in the importance of services in the economy, yet until the 1980s, scholarly literature on the expanding role of trade in services in the world economy remained scarce. This timely research review, edited by a leading analyst in the field, brings...

In 2016, the Government of India proposed negotiations on an agreement to facilitate trade in services to complement the 2013 World Trade Organization Trade Facilitation Agreement in goods. The proposal did not find much support, but plurilateral talks launched in 2017 on various policy areas...

Since the mid-1980s a substantial body of research has taken shape on trade in services. Much of this is inspired by the WTO or regional trade agreements, especially the EU. However, an increasing number of papers focus on the impacts of unilateral services sector liberalization. The literature...

The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) is a landmark in terms of creating multilateral disciplines in virgin territory, but is a failure in terms of generating liberalization and locking-in existing policy regimes affecting international transactions in services. There are two key...

Little progress has been made since the creation of the WTO in expanding and deepening the coverage of services liberalization commitments. This paper identifies and discusses five hypotheses that may explain the absence of dynamism: (i) technological changes allow ever more services to be...