The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and the current GATS negotiations in the World Trade Organization (WTO) require special attention from an environmental policy perspective. Only recently, environmental NGOs and some researchers started to voice concerns about the WTO’s Agreement on Trade in Services, which – in fact – contains features of both a trade and an investment agreement. It is feared that the GATS, and further liberalisation in its context, may have potentially far-reaching implications for domestic policy choices relating to social and environmental objectives. This study reviews existing literature and conducts a first analysis of key GATS provisions and new negotiating proposals from the perspective of environmental policy makers. Based on this analysis, the study aims:
- to highlight currently identifiable environmental policy implications and problems of the GATS; and
to make preliminary policy recommendations from an environmental perspective.