Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/214200 
Year of Publication: 
2020
Series/Report no.: 
WTO Staff Working Paper No. ERSD-2020-02
Publisher: 
World Trade Organization (WTO), Geneva
Abstract: 
Are changes in services markets provoking reform, restrictions, or inertia? To address this question, we draw upon a new World Bank-WTO Services Trade Policy Database (STPD) to analyse the services trade policies of 68 economies in 23 subsectors across five broad areas - financial services, telecommunications, distribution, transportation and professional services, respectively. Policy measures are quantified into a Services Trade Restrictions Index (STRI) following a novel, consistent and transparent framework. Building on these innovations, the paper identifies patterns of services trade policies across sectors and economies, as well as secular trends over the past decade. Higher income economies are still more open on average than developing economies, but the chronology of reform differs markedly across sectors. In telecommunications and finance, we see convergence towards greater openness driven by liberalization in the previously more restrictive developing economies. In the hitherto universally protected transport and professional services, we see policy divergence as some higher income economies pioneer reform. But while explicit restrictions are being lowered in most services sectors - in contrast to recent developments in goods trade policy - we also see greater recourse to regulatory scrutiny, especially in higher income economies. These measures could reflect legitimate prudential or security concerns, but they could also reflect recourse to less transparent forms of protection.
Subjects: 
services trade policy
investment
STRI
trade restrictions
quantification
JEL: 
F13
F14
F23
L80
O24
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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