ABSTRACT
Trade in education services has grown rapidly over the past decade, with the cross-border movement of people, programs, and providers to supply or consume education services. These trends raise many new issues for governments and education stakeholders, not least on the pros and cons of liberalizing education services. Many aspects of the sector, particularly as a tradable service, remain relatively underresearched. Much of the growth in cross-border education has been achieved in spite of low levels of national education commitments, one of the least committed sectors in the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). Indeed, the most important drivers of growth in cross-border education have been external factors such as the growing value of English-language qualifications in labor markets, the inability of education systems in rapidly growing economies to keep pace with growing demand for tertiary qualifications, international study as a pathway to migration, and technological developments that enable multi-site delivery of programs. Nevertheless, education services is a large, commercially important sector and is within the scope of the services negotiations of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Doha Round.
