Existing literature has examined factors underlying the formation of goods trade agreements (GTA) and bilateral investment treaties but not the determinants of services trade agreement (STA) membership. This paper bridges the gap by studying the economic and political determinants of STA membership. Its main contribution lies in providing an economic explanation of unilateral services regulatory provisions, embodied in the World Bank’s Services Trade Restrictiveness Index (Borchert et al. in World Bank Econ Rev 28:162–188, 2014), and their interaction with services preferentialism. The authors find that unilateral services provisions are closely associated with economic determinants. They also find that countries’ participation in STAs is correlated with the similarity of their unilateral services trade restrictiveness, a finding not observed for “goods-only” trade agreements. While geographical and cultural determinants are found to be broadly similar for GTAs and STAs, association with economic size of partners, factor endowments and services cost shares in GDP comes through more strongly for goods-only agreements.

现有文献研究了商品贸易协定（GTA）和双边投资条约形成的基础因素，但没有研究服务贸易协定（STA）成员资格的决定因素。本文通过研究STA成员的经济和政治决定因素来弥合差距。它的主要贡献在于对世界银行服务贸易限制指数（Borchert等人，世界银行经济评论28：162-188，2014年）中体现的单方面服务监管规定进行经济学解释，以及它们与服务偏好的相互作用。作者发现，单方面服务条款与经济决定因素密切相关。他们还发现，国家对STA的参与与其单边服务贸易限制的相似性相关，没有发现“仅商品”贸易协定的发现。尽管发现GTA和STA的地理和文化决定因素大致相似，但与仅合作伙伴达成的商品的经济规模，要素and赋和服务成本在GDP中所占的份额之间的联系更为紧密。