IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/oec/traaab/264-en.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Shedding light on the drivers of services tradability over two decades

Author

Listed:
  • Sebastian Benz

    (OECD)

  • Alexander Jaax

    (OECD)

  • Yoto V. Yotov

    (Drexel University)

Abstract

Services have become significantly more tradable in the first two decades of the 21st century. This paper documents that trade costs for financial services, communication services and business services fell by between 30% and 60% between 2000 and 2019. Information and communication technology and growth of air traffic have acted as key drivers of this development. While there is some variation across sectors, the analysis suggests that these two determinants jointly account for a quarter to half of the aggregate decline in trade costs for services during this 20-year period. Furthermore, services provisions in regional trade agreements (RTAs) can explain between 3% and 14% of the reduction in trade costs for communications services and financial and insurance services. These findings demonstrate the importance of whole-of-government strategies to promote services trade competitiveness, inter alia market access, regulatory reform, as well as investment in physical and digital infrastructure and adoption of new technologies.

Suggested Citation

  • Sebastian Benz & Alexander Jaax & Yoto V. Yotov, 2022. "Shedding light on the drivers of services tradability over two decades," OECD Trade Policy Papers 264, OECD Publishing.
    • Handle: RePEc:oec:traaab:264-en
    DOI: 10.1787/d5f3c149-en
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1787/d5f3c149-en
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1787/d5f3c149-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
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Xiaosong Zheng & Anran Sun, 2023. "Digital Services Trade between China and V4 Countries – A Study of Trade Complementarity and Regulatory Restrictiveness," Journal of Economics / Ekonomicky casopis, Institute of Economic Research, Slovak Academy of Sciences, vol. 71(2), pages 139-154, February.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Digital trade; Digitalisation; Services trade; Trade costs; Trade liberalisation; Trade policy;
    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
    • O33 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes
    • F68 - International Economics - - Economic Impacts of Globalization - - - 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:traaab:264-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/tdoecfr.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.