Do the services commitments that countries have made in their post-Uruguay Round regional trade agreements (RTAs) indicate the types of concessions that they would be willing to multilateralise in the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS)? While there are important legal and economic...

This study analyses how domestic regulation affects trade in services through commercial presence and to what extent regulation, level and heterogeneity, has an impact on the choice of mode of servicing a foreign market for total services, financial services, transport, communication, computer,...

This study empirically investigates key restrictions to the internationalisation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in manufacturing and across different types of services. The study explores the extent to which binding constraints faced by SMEs producing goods may differ from small...

This paper presents the services trade restrictiveness indices (STRIs) for financial services. The STRIs are composite indices taking values between zero and one, zero representing an open market and one a market completely closed to foreign services providers. The indices are calculated for 40...

This paper uses newly released OECD data on services trade restrictions (STRI) to analyse the relationship between services trade restrictions, cross-border trade in services and trade in downstream manufactured goods. A standard gravity model is enhanced by the STRI indices in a cross-section...

This study forms part of on-going OECD work on trade in services, in co-operation with UNCTAD, aimed at assisting WTO Members in managing request-offer negotiations under the GATS. The key objective is to help officials of WTO Members in both gaining a greater insight into the particular issues...

This study presents an exploratory analysis of export subsidies in the services field. It draws from a variety of sources in an effort to provide insights into the characteristics and use of these measures. The report, while not generating accurate measures of the extent and effects of export...

Services are the main drivers of economic growth in OECD countries and they are becoming increasingly innovative. This study analyses the role of open services markets in the transfer and diffusion of technology from developed countries to developing countries. It first explores how trade in...

This paper applies the most advanced methodologies for measuring services barriers to calculate the restrictiveness and the impact of services barriers in selected transition economies, i.e. the Baltic States, and eight South Eastern European (SEE) countries (for telecommunications and banking)...

This paper presents improved approaches to measurement of services barriers by using alternative weighting methods and improved econometric specifications; the data include barriers affecting each mode of services supply and additional sector-specific regulatory variables. We provide an...