This paper presents the results of a four-year project tackling several issues relating to multilateral and preferential trade in services. One of the underlying organising principles of our research on services trade has been a presumed fault line between the innate coherence that is achieved...

In the occasion of the US - Gambling ruling, this paper attempts to draw the dividing line between the four most important, from a liberalisation viewpoint, GATS provisions that appear to overlap in several instances, i.e. Articles VI, XVI, XVII, and XVIII. After demarcating the purview of these...

A necessity test is a tool that reflects the balance between two potentially conflicting interests or challenges - the one being primarily domestic in nature, the other more international or multilateral in character. The domestic challenge stems from each country's prerogative to regulate in...

Market access is the most important liberalizing principle in the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). It entails a general prohibition of quantitative restrictions, which however is conditional on commitments undertaken by Members in their respective Schedules of Commitments. Case-law...

The increased importance of environmental protection led to the introduction of sustainability-related criteria in standard-setting practices. A discomfort with the functioning, working methods and certain rigidities of the global standardizing bodies such as the ISO led to a mushrooming of a...

Can a WTO Member discriminate against foreign suppliers of services located in jurisdictions that refuse to share information with a government to permit it to determine if its nationals engage in tax evasion? Does it matter if the Member uses standards developed by an international body as the...

The conclusion of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) constitutes a priority and key component of the external trade policy of the European Union (EU). It is also an immediate follow-up to several years of regulatory cooperation between the two global trade powers. In an...

Due to legislative and judicial developments, standard-setting has come to the forefront of public debates. Being for a long time considered as a 'no passing zone' for everyone but engineers and technical experts, standard-setting organizations (SSOs) have produced a rowing solid body of...

Trade regulation may never have been in more flux than it is now. Other than the emergence of ‘megaregionals' (such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership-TTIP or the Trans-pacific Partnership-TPP) and the difficulties in finalizing the Doha Development Agenda, increased...