Regulatory Implications of Multilateral Trade Liberalisation for the Global Services Market: The Case of the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA)

Abstract

Bilateral commitments on the liberalisation of services markets typically build upon those made by individual countries in the World Trade Organization (WTO) under the General Agreement of Trade in Services (GATS). These commitments usually guarantee a noodle bowl of preferential market access, but not much in the way of regulatory harmonisation for globalised services industries. This study aims to investigate the normative and economic implications of multilateral market openings and regulatory harmonisation of the global services sectors beyond the bilateral and WTO/GATS frameworks. The mobile communications industry serves as the initial benchmark analysis in order to empirically assess whether the multilateral liberalisation of the global services market can potentially respond more effectively to the growing transnational competition in production inputs, consumption outputs, and capital attraction in a broader pool of service-oriented economies. Ultimately, this study argues that the multilateral opening of the global services market is on balance beneficial to the domestic services industries, and as such the WTO/GATS framework can be superseded by further economic integration and regulatory harmonisation in future multilateral trade agreements currently under negotiation, such as the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA).