In the context of international negotiations, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) was the result of a complex process of political quid pro quos that propelled services on the agenda of the Uruguay Round negotiations and was finally concluded in 1995 thus becoming the first multilateral agreement covering this important and growing area of services trade. By and large, major services providers in the US and Europe acted as demandeurs for services rules and for a process that would lead to global trade expansion in the sector. Their counterparts in developing countries were more perplexed and their development concerns, though omnipresent in the process, were ultimately left vague.
The preamble to the Agreement recognises the growing importance of trade in services for the growth and development of the world economy; the need to establish a multilateral framework of principles and rules for trade in services with a view to the expansion of such trade under conditions of transparency and progressive liberalisation and as a means of promoting the economic growth of all trading partners and the development of developing countries, while taking into account the difficulty of the Least Developed Countries due to their special economic situation, as well as their financial and developmental needs.
The GATS negotiations cover a broad scope of application, in the sense that most measures imposed by governments — national, regional and local — affecting trade in services are covered, with the important exception of services supplied in the exercise of governmental authority and certain specific sectors.