Rules for Trade in Services 2.0: Adapting the Gats to a Changing Trade Landscape

This book explores the adaptating process of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) to a constantly changing trade and policy context.

The adoption of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), a multilateral agreement with stand-alone rules and principles for the governance of trade and investment in services, represented a watershedin the history of global trade governance. Over three decades after the drafting of the Agreement, WTO Members struggle to deliver on the GATS’ mandate to achieve progressively higher levels of trade liberalisation in a radically different trade and policy landscape. Against this background, this book examines the contribution of the WTO negotiating, adjudicative, and deliberative functions to adapting the GATS to changing circumstances. The book uncovers an extremely flexible and adaptable agreement whose full potential has yet to be realised due to a complex set of factors weighing more broadly on the use of the WTO functions. The book distils the factors at play that constrain WTO Members’ capacity to adapt the Agreement to changing circumstances and explores potential pathways to overcome them.

The book will be of interest to scholars, policy makers, and trade diplomats interested in understanding the factors and processes conditioning the adaptation of a multilateral trade agreement to changing trade and policy circumstances.

Gabriel Gari is a trade lawyer working for the UK Department for Business and Trade on trade in services matters. Prior to this position, Gabriel was Reader in International Economic Law at Queen Mary, University of London, where he spent over a decade and a half researching on trade in services. Gabriel has consulted with numerous International Organisations and Industry Associations and provided training for Government Officials on trade in services. He has published extensively on trade in services, and has a combined twenty years’ experience on international trade law as an academic and practitioner. Gabriel holds a PhD from Queen Mary University of London, an LLM from the London School of Economics and degrees in law and in sociology from Universidad de la República del Uruguay.