IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/oec/ecoaaa/1617-en.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Services trade costs in the United States: A simulation based on the OECD Services Trade Restrictiveness Index

Author

Listed:
  • Sebastian Benz
  • Alexander Jaax

Abstract

While services account for almost 80% of GDP in the United States and a growing share of global trade, regulatory barriers to services trade around the world are still high. Using a hypothetical liberalisation scenario, this paper assesses the potential reduction of trade costs that could be achieved in 17 US services sectors. The analysis relies on the OECD Services Trade Restrictiveness Index (STRI) which records barriers to services trade in 46 economies. The illustrative scenario assumes a 50% reduction in the gap between the current STRI score of the United States and the score of the least restrictive country in each sector. The results highlight the economic benefits of aligning US services regulation with global best practice. The average reduction in trade costs across the 17 sectors analysed would amount to 9.7 percentage points, with a quarter of the sectors experiencing reductions larger than 14.1 percentage points and another quarter experiencing reductions smaller than 5.3 percentage points.

Suggested Citation

  • Sebastian Benz & Alexander Jaax, 2020. "Services trade costs in the United States: A simulation based on the OECD Services Trade Restrictiveness Index," OECD Economics Department Working Papers 1617, OECD Publishing.
    • Handle: RePEc:oec:ecoaaa:1617-en
    DOI: 10.1787/706b87c1-en
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1787/706b87c1-en
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1787/706b87c1-en?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    regulation; services trade; services trade restrictions; trade cost; trade liberalisation;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • F13 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Trade Policy; International Trade Organizations
    • F14 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Empirical Studies of Trade
    • F15 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Economic Integration
    • F68 - International Economics - - Economic Impacts of Globalization - - - Policy
    • L88 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Government Policy

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oec:ecoaaa:1617-en. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/edoecfr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.