This report casts light on the impact of regulatory restrictions on the movement of people across international borders on services trade costs. Such restrictions were implemented on health and safety grounds following the COVID-19 outbreak in March 2020. The analysis relies on several...

This paper presents new data on regulatory barriers affecting services trade within the European Economic Area (EEA), covering 25 EEA countries, 22 sectors and five years (2014-2018). Following the methodology of the OECD Services Trade Restrictiveness Index (STRI), qualitative information is...

This report presents new cross-country evidence on labour market transitions in sectors exposed to growing volumes of international trade, and the job characteristics of workers employed in these sectors. It shows that export growth is significantly associated with lower job loss risk. In...

This paper presents indices of regulatory heterogeneity based on the rich information in the STRI regulatory database. The indices are built from assessing – for each country pair and each measure – whether or not the countries have the same regulation. For each country pair and each sector,...

This paper highlights the large contribution of services to the Brazilian economy and the under-exploited potential of services to sustain productivity gains and international competitiveness. The areas with the largest potential for regulatory reform include improvements in the general business...

This report explores the relationship between services trade policies and mark-ups at the firm level, taken as a measure of competitive pressure. Restrictive regulations are found to enable firms to charge higher mark-ups in a majority of services sectors, suggesting ample scope for...

This paper presents the services trade restrictiveness indices (STRIs) for transport and courier 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...

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...