The GATS Notion of Public Services as an Instance of Intergovernmental Agnosticism: Comparative Insights from the EU Supranational Dialectic, in Journal of World Trade

Against the background of the debate about the impact of World Trade Organization (WTO) law on the provision of public services at the national level, this article seeks to establish whether a notion of public services has emerged under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). After outlining the role of that concept in the context of economic integration agreements in general, this article surveys GATS exemptions and regulatory provisions and argues that the GATS has, in fact, failed to develop an autonomous notion of public services. Such an ‘agnostic’ approach is contrasted with the ‘dialectic’ characterizing the European Union (EU), which, in constant dialogue with its Member States, has developed a sophisticated theoretical and regulatory framework for ‘Services of General Interest (SGI)’. It is concluded that the institutional features that differentiate WTO intergovernmentalism from EU supra- nationalism largely account for such a conceptual cleavage.