Mode 4 Services

FTA / RoO

Movement of natural persons — service providers travel temporarily to supply services in another country.

Sources

1. World Trade Organization — Modes of supply under the GATS wto.org accessed 17 September 2026

Mode 4 is supply “by a service supplier of one Member, through the presence of natural persons of a Member in the territory of any other Member” — the person travels. The WTO’s illustrations are foreign nationals working as independent consultants or as employees within another country’s territory. Mode 4 is the most negotiated and least liberalised of the four, and the reason is structural rather than commercial: commitments here run straight into immigration policy, which members guard closely. A Mode 4 commitment is about temporary presence to supply a service, not about access to the labour market, and conflating the two is the commonest misreading of it.

These words are the WTO’s own explanatory text, not the agreement itself: the treaty PDFs on wto.org are closed to automated retrieval, so nothing here is presented as a quotation from a treaty article.

Related terms

• Absorption Principle
• Bilateral Cumulation
• Certificate of Origin
• Change in Tariff Classification
• Cumulation
• Diagonal Cumulation

From the AJG lexicon archive (July 2026).