According to the WTO, over a fifth of world trade consists of transactions in services. The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) was created to extend the multilateral trading system to services, in the same way the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) provides such a system for trade in goods. Given its reach, the treaty's significance continues to grow.

This academically rigorous yet highly accessible book guides the reader through an ocean of literature and interpretative possibilities embodied in GATS. In doing so, it provides a road map of the various interpretative possibilities and dilemmas posed by the treaty. The work advances a legal analysis of GATS, based on its historical and institutional roots, while at the same time taking into account its objectives and prospects, as well as the balance of interests involved. In total, this timely book presents a thorough legal analysis of GATS that will serve as a comprehensive yet highly useful guide to the agreement.

This is a detailed guide to reading WTO Schedules of Commitments for Goods and Services.

With the establishment of the WTO, trade in services became part of the world trade order. Volume 6 is dedicated to these rather recent developments. It covers the core agreement, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) with annexes, as well as the additional instruments , which have been adopted later on to govern the liberalization in specific sectors. Those are the Understanding on Commitments in Financial Services, the Second Protocol on Financial Services, the Third Protocol on the Movement of Natural Persons, the Fourth Protocol on Basic Telecommunications and the Fifth Protocol, which contains further rules for financial services. This volume will be a valuable reference tool for the WTO community as a whole, as well as for professionals and researchers, who deal with one of the sectors concerned, e.g. financial services and telecommunications. Furthermore, it is highly relevant in view of those sectors, which are the subject of ongoing liberalization efforts or earmarked for future negotiations, namely accounting, legal services, transport, tourism, environmental services, legal and educational services.

In the decade since the establishment of the WTO, the great majority of disputes between member states resolved and decided through the dispute settlement system of the WTO arose in the field of trade remedies law, a fact which clearly shows the high demand by the trade community for the rule of law in this area. Responsive to such needs, the fourth volume encompasses the whole range of trade remedies regulation under the auspices of the WTO in the respective articles of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the related multilateral agreements on trade in goods, i.e., Articles VI, XII, XIX GATT 1994; the Understanding on the Balance-of-Payments; the Agreement on Implementation of Article VI GATT 1994 (Anti-Dumping Agreement); the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Duties; and the Agreement on Safeguards. Leading practitioners and scholars have gathered to provide an invaluable insight and easy access to the law on trade remedies in an article-by-article commentary approach. As such, it will be an essential work not only for trade remedies practitioners but to persons interested in trade remedies be they scholars, academics, international and domestic lawyers, political scientists and economists, or NGO representatives.

This is primarily a textbook for graduate and upper-level undergraduate students of law. However, practising lawyers and policy-makers who are looking for an introduction to WTO law will also find it invaluable. The book covers both the institutional and substantive law of the WTO. While the treatment of the law is often quite detailed, the main aim of this textbook is to make clear the basic principles and underlying logic of WTO law and the world trading system. Each section contains questions and assignments, to allow students to assess their understanding and develop useful practical skills. At the end of each chapter there is a helpful summary, as well as an exercise on specific, true-to-life international trade problems.

The "Max Planck Commentaries on World Trade Law" explain the whole range of world trade law in seven individual article-by-article type commentaries. While the first volume ("WTO - World Economic Order, World Trade Law") serves as a nutshell-type introduction to the WTO, the remaining six volumes focus on specific aspects of WTO law. The second volume ("WTO - Institutions and Dispute Settlement") brings together the WTO institutional fundamentals and the whole dispute settlement. The third volume ("WTO - Technical Barriers and SPS Measures") deals with the most controversial provisions on technical standards, protection of health and environment. The fourth volume ("WTO - Trade Remedies") is devoted to the very specific area of antidumping, subsidies and safeguards. The fifth volume ("WTO - Trade in Goods") comments on the substantial trade in good rules of the GATT/WTO. Eventually, the sixth and seventh volume ("WTO - Trade in Services" and "WTO - Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights") deal with intellectual property rights and trade in services rules respectively.

Trade in services, far more than trade in goods, is affected by a variety of domestic regulations, ranging from qualification and licensing requirements in professional services to pro-competitive regulation in telecommunications services. Experience shows that the quality of regulation strongly influences the consequences of trade liberalization. WTO members have agreed that a central task in the ongoing services negotiations will be to develop a set of rules to ensure that domestic regulations support rather than impede trade liberalization. Since these rules are bound to have a profound impact on the evolution of policy, particularly in developing countries, it is important that they be conducive to economically rational policy-making. This book addresses two central questions: What impact can international trade rules on services have on the exercise of domestic regulatory sovereignty? And how can services negotiations be harnessed to promote and consolidate domestic policy reform across highly diverse sectors? The book, with contributions from several of the world's leading experts in the field, explores a range of rule-making challenges arising at this policy interface, in areas such as transparency, standards and the adoption of a necessity test for services trade. Contributions also provide an in-depth look at these issues in the key areas of accountancy, energy, finance, health, telecommunications and transportation services.

In an era where services play an increasingly vital role in servicified global value chains, this insightful book provides a comprehensive study of legal aspects of rules of origin for services and their importance in international trade.

International law has historically regulated foreign trade and foreign investment differently. Distinct evolutionary pathways have led to variances in treaty form, institutional culture, and dispute settlement. With their inevitable erosion through the late twentieth to early twenty-first centuries, those weak boundaries have become porous and indefensible. Powerful economic, legal and sociological factors are now pushing the two systems together. In this book, Jürgen Kurtz systematically explores the often complex and little-understood dynamics of this convergence phenomenon. Kurtz addresses the growing connections between international trade and investment law, proposing a theoretically grounded and doctrinally tractable framework to understand the deepening relationship between them. The book also offers reform ideas and possibilities, providing treaty negotiators and other government officials with a set of theoretical insights and doctrinal models that can guide actors in building a justifiable and sustainable level of commonality between the two legal systems.