Services liberalization in the new generation of preferential trade agreements: How much further than the GATS?

In the context of stalled multilateral trade negotiations, preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have continued to proliferate, raising important trade and policy issues. Unlike in any other period since the establishment of the multilateral trading system, all important trading nations are now involved in PTA discussions of one form or another. In the midst of the recent flurry of PTA activity, this paper attempts to fill a gap in the literature by providing a comprehensive evaluation of the liberalization commitments contained in the recent wave of preferential trade agreements on services. Indeed, the trade literature has tended to limit its examination of services components of PTAs to the type of rules they contain and to such other characteristics as whether a GATStype positive listing or NAFTA-type negative listing was used in undertaking commitments.