Preferential Services Liberation

"The book consists of four parts. The first part presents and develops WTO law regarding preferentialism in services. It starts by exploring the historic background of regional and preferential trade agreements and the reasons for their significant increase especially during the last two decades. It then provides a substantive analysis and interpretation of Art. V GATS that includes the detailed rules on services PTAs. The aim of the first part is to provide a theoretical framework for a legal analysis of individual services agreements. The book focuses on the so-called internal requirement for EIAs included in the first paragraph of Art. V16, as well as on the possibility to give consideration to the relationship of the agreement to a wider process of economic integration or trade liberalization among the countries concerned (paragraph 2 of Art. V). On the contrary, the external requirement of Art. V:4, which concerns the requirement of not to raise the overall level of barriers in respect of any Member outside the agreement, is not explored to the same length. That is because the book aims at providing a framework for analyzing the internal liberalization levels of EIAs"--