Introduction

The ‘services economy’ is a proxy term for the transformation of capitalism in the later twentieth century. By the 1960s, the golden age of industrial capitalism supported by the Keynesian nation-state was in decline. Twenty years later, it was over. The prospects for the future prosperity of Western economies now rested on the transnational service-driven economy, later embraced within a technology-enhanced ‘knowledge economy’. To realise this potential it was necessary to replace the regime that had regulated services for a range of social, cultural, democratic, economic and developmental objectives with one that privileged a commodified notion of services that could be traded within internationalised markets. The non-market dimensions of services and the primary factors of their production – labour, capital and knowledge – had to be reconceived within the new paradigm.

This regulatory transformation began at the national level through neoliberalism. States were then urged to entrench their commitment to market regulation through a supranational regime that functions as enabler, catalyst and enforcer of open international services markets. The standard-bearer for that regime is the World Trade Organization's General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). This multilateral treaty sets the ideological parameters and legal minimum content for a plethora of bilateral and regional agreements that have overtaken it in depth and scope in recent years. Progressively, national regulatory autonomy and the multifaceted priorities accorded by governments to the regulation of services activities have become subordinated, on pain of economic sanctions, to this panoply of international trade treaties.