The New Development Of GATS Rules And Regulation Of Trade In Services

Over the past 30 years, huge boom has achieved in the service economy, and it represents the fastest growing sector of the global economy and trade nowadays. Moreover, the rapid development of science and technology has led to the greater potential for trading services, especially for a growing electronic cross-border delivery of services.Due to its particularities, comparing with trade in goods, trade in services attract more attention of governments to regulate the supply of services within their territories, in order to meet national policy objectives, which impede the development of trading services more or less at the same time. However, there is no multilateral agreement regulating the problem in a long period.The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) is the first and only set of multilateral rules governing international trade in services, negotiated in the Uruguay Round, and has some rules about how to regulate trade in services from a proper governance perspective. The importance of GATS is beyond compare, but when the idea of bringing rules on services into the multilateral trading system was floated in the early to mid 1980s, a number of countries were sceptical and even opposed. They believed such an agreement could undermine governments' ability to pursue national policy objectives and constrain their regulatory powers. The agreement that was developed, however, allows a high degree of flexibility, both within the framework of rules and also in terms of the market access commitments. The flexibility of the GATS cause a lot of uncertainty, especially in governing services.A recent case settled by DSB, namely United States-Measures Affecting the Cross-Border Supply of Gambling and Betting Services(US-Gambling), is not only the first case centred exclusively on the interpretation of main obligations assumed under the GATS, but also has provided an set of answers to the unresolved questions of the GATS. The case has significantly advanced our understanding with respect to the GATS in the face of electronic service delivery and how to regulate trading services from a proper GATS perspective.The main objective of this paper was to distill substantive conclusions of the US-Gambling and their relevance to trading services and certain core concepts of the GATS, especially to domestic regulations. It also sheds light on the implications of the case for the construction of domestic regulation of trading services in China, to stimulate trading services of china to further prosperity.