DETERMINED to achieve deeper regional integration and sustainable economic growth and development and to meet the challenges of globalization; RECOGNIZING the importance of services trade for growth and development and mindful of the need to diversify SADC economies through greater services trade; CONVINCED that an integrated regional market for services, complemented by cooperative mechanisms, will create new opportunities for a dynamic business sector, and strengthen the Region's services capacity, its efficiency, and competitiveness and expand the Region's services exports; ACKNOWLEDGING the existence of asymmetry as some Member States are disadvantaged by reason of their size, structure, vulnerability and levels of development of their economies; REAFFIRMING the right of Member States to regulate and to introduce new regulations to meet national policy objectives, and in light of asymmetry in terms of services regulation, recognising the particular need for least developed countries to use this right; MINDFUL of the need to allow for the appropriate pacing and sequencing of reform (regulatory, institutional and administrative) and liberalisation in the services sectors of the Region; SEEKING to achieve coherence in the Region's intra-regional, inter-regional and multilateral commitments and negotiations on trade in services; REAFFIRMING the rights and obligations that Member States have . under the World Trade Organisation's (WTO)_General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS); and HAVING DECIDED upon the further liberalization of intra-regional trade in services on the basis of fair, mutually equitable and beneficial trade arrangements, complemented by and in consistency with Protocols in specific services sectors; HEREBY AGREE as follows: 2