The OECD-WTO Balanced Trade in Services database - conference presentation

Complete, consistent and balanced bilateral trade in services statistics are vital for the empirical analysis of international trade as well as for policy making and trade negotiations. Unfortunately, such data are not readily available. This paper presents the work of OECD and WTO to build a complete services data set to serve as input for the compilation of the Inter-Country Input-Output Table, and as a tool for policy analysis in general. The first edition of the Balanced Trade in Services (BaTIS) dataset is currently completed, covering the 1995-2012 period, 191 countries and partners, and 11 main EBOPS 2002 categories. This paper accompanies the dataset and describes its compilation methodology in detail, including the collection and cleaning of the reported data, the different methodologies used to estimate the missing information, and the final balancing of the exports and imports flows.