Services Trade Capability

1883 · 143 years ago

The Paris Convention created the first multilateral treaty protecting patents and trademarks

Member states agreed to extend patent and trademark protection to foreign applicants on the same terms as their own citizens, laying the legal foundation for treating inventions and brands as internationally tradable intangible property.

1886 · 140 years ago

The Berne Convention gave literary and artistic works cross-border copyright protection

Signatory countries agreed to recognise each other's copyrights automatically, without registration, establishing the principle that creative and intellectual output was property that could be owned and licensed across national borders.

1944 · 82 years ago

The Bretton Woods conference built the postwar architecture for cross-border capital and finance

Delegates from 44 countries created the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, establishing rules and institutions that underpinned the growth of international banking and financial services trade for the rest of the century.

1960s · over 60 years ago

The Eurodollar market let banks trade financial services outside home-country regulation

Dollar deposits held outside the United States grew into a large offshore pool of capital that banks in London and elsewhere could lend and manage free of domestic controls, an early model for globally traded financial services.

1970 · 56 years ago

The World Intellectual Property Organization became a specialised agency of the United Nations

Established to administer international treaties on patents, trademarks and copyright, WIPO gave intangible assets a permanent multilateral home, later expanding to track cross-border royalty and licensing flows worldwide.

1985 · 41 years ago

Texas Instruments opened the first foreign-owned software centre in Bangalore

The facility, among the first of its kind run by a multinational outside its home country, demonstrated that skilled software work could be delivered reliably from India, seeding the cluster that grew into the country's IT services export industry.

1986 · 40 years ago

The City of London's Big Bang opened British financial services to foreign competition

Deregulation scrapped fixed commissions and ownership restrictions on stockbrokers overnight, drawing in foreign banks and turning London into a leading global hub for cross-border financial services trade for decades afterwards.

1995 · 31 years ago

The General Agreement on Trade in Services brought services under multilateral trade rules for the first time

Drafted during the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, GATS became one of the four pillars of the treaty comprising the World Trade Organization Agreement in 1995, bringing services under multilateral trade rules for the first time. It defined four modes of supplying services across borders, from cross-border delivery to the temporary movement of professionals, and became the framework underpinning all subsequent services negotiations.

1995 · 31 years ago

The TRIPS Agreement linked intellectual property protection to global trade rules

The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights obliged WTO members to enforce minimum patent, copyright and trademark standards, turning intangible assets into a formal subject of trade disputes and retaliation.

1999 to 2000 · 27 years ago

The Y2K remediation effort created the first mass market for offshore IT services

Global demand to fix millennium-bug software defects sent Western firms searching for large, low-cost, English-speaking programming workforces, cementing India's position as the world's leading exporter of information technology and back-office services.

February 2012 · 14 years ago

50 countries began negotiating the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA)

From February 2012, 50 countries — 28 of them represented by the European Union — opened negotiations on a plurilateral Trade in Services Agreement. The talks aimed to liberalise cross-border services trade beyond existing WTO commitments.

2014 · 12 years ago

European Commission Chief Trade Economist Lucian Cernat introduced the concept of "Mode 5" services

Cernat proposed an additional mode of services supply beyond the four recognised in GATS, capturing services value embedded in traded goods. The concept expanded analytical understanding of how intangibles cross borders.

July 2026 · last month

India and the UK brought their free trade agreement into force, with 20,000 annual visas for professionals

The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, effective 15 July 2026, created a working group to negotiate mutual recognition of professional qualifications in accountancy, architecture and engineering, alongside quota-based mobility for IT and design specialists.

• The two governments had signed the pact a year earlier

January 2026 · 7 months ago

India recorded its highest-ever monthly services exports

Services shipments reached 43.9 billion US dollars in the month, extending a run that took full-year services exports to a record 387.6 billion dollars in the previous financial year, led by software, IT and back-office services.

January 2026 · 7 months ago

Turkey cut its digital services tax from 7.5 to 5 per cent

A presidential decree reduced the levy on digital services revenue effective 1 January 2026, with a further phased cut to 2.5 per cent due in 2027, after months of US pressure over the tax's impact on American technology firms.

2026 · this year

The World Intellectual Property Organization found that technology diffusion remains highly concentrated

The World Intellectual Property Report 2026 concluded that knowledge and technology now spread between economies faster than ever, based on patent and citation data, but that the gains stayed clustered among a small group of advanced economies.

2026 · this year

Nigeria climbed to sixth in a global outsourcing competitiveness ranking

The Global Outsourcing Talent Index placed Nigeria sixth worldwide, citing English proficiency, competitive labour costs and a deep talent pool as the country built out software, fintech and business-process export capacity.

• Kenya and Egypt ranked just behind Nigeria in the same index

2026 · this year

The Philippines pushed its outsourcing sector toward higher-value services

The IT-BPM industry, projected to generate 42 billion US dollars in export revenue and employ around 1.97 million people in 2026, drew growing demand from Gulf clients in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar for specialised technical work.

2026 · this year

India consolidated its position as the world's leading base for captive service centres

More than 1,700 global capability centres operated by multinational firms were active in the country, over half the world's total, handling engineering, finance and research functions once kept in-house at head offices abroad.

• Consultancies projected the sector to reach 100 billion dollars by 2030

October 2025 · 10 months ago

The WTO flagged a marked slowdown in world services trade

The organisation's autumn trade outlook cut its services growth forecast from 6.8 per cent in 2024 to around 4.6 per cent for 2025, citing tariff-driven uncertainty spilling over from goods trade into transport, logistics and investment-related services.

• The WTO updated its services trade data hub

June 2025 · last year

Canada rescinded its digital services tax

Ottawa withdrew the 3 per cent levy on large technology firms' Canadian revenue after Washington cut off bilateral trade talks in protest, restoring negotiations on a wider economic and security agreement between the two countries.

Late 2025 · last year

France proposed doubling its digital services tax to 6 per cent

The measure, floated during budget negotiations, would raise the levy on large technology companies' French revenue, keeping pressure on Washington even as other governments retreated from their own digital services taxes under US threats.

2016 · 10 years ago

Trade in Services Agreement negotiations stalled amid electoral uncertainty among participants

TISA negotiations ceased to progress from early 2016, attributed to uncertainty following the many elections held that year. The stall left services trade liberalisation dependent on the older GATS framework.