GATS Commitments and Liberalization of the Sports Service Industry: WTO Compliance and Policy Challenges

Abstract

The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) has created major changes to global service sector liberalization by including the sports service industry within its scope. The sports service industry refers to those responsible for the administration and delivery of a multiplicity of services concerning professional and amateur sport, including event handling, athlete preparation, dissemination, arena management, and overseas service within the entertainment and economic arena. Understanding the impact of GATS commitments on sports services is important as the sports industry plays a significant role in the global development of the economy, methods of trade liberalization, and cross-border services facilitation. Currently, scholars lack extensive research on how the sports service sector meets GATS commitments through WTO compliance and policy implementation procedures. The study of this research gap is pertinent to helping establish export policies for sports services that suit their unique attributes. The study brings to the fore new findings concerning the diverse implementation of GATS by WTO countries and the differences between the global policy expectations and the local regulations. The author seeks to eliminate this research gap through an examination of GATS regulations alongside sports services industries to study the domestic policy management and WTO compliance issues experienced by countries. A qualitative approach consisting of a systematic literature review (SLR) serves as the methodology to analyze academic and policy-oriented documents used for this study. The outcomes reveal that the minimal sports services sector liberalization within GATS principles and struggles between trade mandates versus local policy guidelines along with varying GATS commitment follow-up by WTO members. The results demonstrate the necessity for governments to develop specialized policies that integrate both worldwide market liberalization practices and sports services sector characteristics when pursuing international obligations and domestic priorities.