ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the regulatory environment both domestic and international in which the strategies take place as one such factor. Decisions on whether to penetrate a new market, whether to do so through cross-border network delivery, licensing, joint ventures or foreign direct investment in order to provide a homogeneous service to a global client are often constrained by the features of respective national laws and regulations. In the context of progressive globalization of their activities throughout the 1970s, service providers have been increasingly concerned with the effects of regulatory impediments to trade and, under the Uruguay Round, governments have been negotiating a new trade in services regime meant to address such concerns. The signatories of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and its annex on professional services will be under obligation to provide effective market access to foreign service providers on their national territories on the basis of the so-called national treatment principle.
