Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

There has been a growing interest in monitoring patterns of trade in services around the world, which is partly associated with ongoing trade negotiations and partly due to the increasing importance of services in OECD economies. It has been developed to supplement other OECD publications on trade in services to address the data needs of trade analysts. It is also an important part of OECD's programme to facilitate the implementation of the recommendations of the revised Manual on Statistics of International Trade in Services 2010.Other commentsThe Task Force on Statistics of International Trade in Services maintains a matrix summarising the status of the trade in services data collection performed by International Organisations. The table displays links to the databases as well as update timetables, availability of metadata, availability of bilateral data, and other important characteristics.

The allocation of bilateral intermediate imports across using industries assumes that import coefficients are the same for all trade partners, i.e. SHAREipkt is identical across exporter countries. Hence, the bilateral pattern of imported intermediates from industry p is the same across all using industries k. However, it is different from the bilateral pattern of total imports from industry p because trade data (measured by VALUEijpt) allows distinguishing bilateral imports of intermediates from final good imports in industry p. While the BEC classification enables the identification of intermediate goods, no similar classification is available for trade in services, due to the high level of aggregation in services trade data. While goods trade data are based on customs declarations allowing the identification of goods at a highly disaggregated level, services trade data are based on a variety of information such as business accounts, administrative sources, surveys, and estimation techniques (Manual on Statistics of International Trade in Services, 2002). Hence, in the case of trade in services, VALUEijpt is the total value of imports of service p, i.e. both final and intermediate (and not only services that are used in the production of other goods and services, as in the case of goods data). By making an additional assumption and adjusting SHAREipkt, it is however possible to calculate trade in intermediate services. In the case of services imports, SHAREipkt is the share of imported service inputs p used by industry k in total imports of p of country i. In the case of services, besides the assumption that all trading partners have the same distribution of intermediate imports p across using industries k, it is furthermore required that the share of intermediate services in overall bilateral services imports of country i is the same across all partner countries j. Finally, it should be mentioned that trade data reported in the trade statistics do not fully match imports as reported in I-O tables. One main reason is that while trade data is recorded at consumer prices, I-O tables are evaluated at producer prices. There are also other differences such as the treatment of re-exports, scrap metal, waste products and second hand goods or unallocated trade data.