A global matrix of trade in services

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 on such a data set to support policy analysis and also the compilation of the Inter-Country Input-Output Table used to derive trade in value added indicators. The paper describes the overall approach and progress-to–date, detailing the data collection and cleaning methods as well as the different estimation methodologies used for filling missing data. Results achieved so far include the production of a dataset with total services and all EBOPS categories with partner World for 191 countries from 1995-2012, a full bilateral specification of total trade in services statistics from 1995-2012 (191 countries and partners), as well as a substantive increase in available data points on bilateral trade by EBOPS category (from 576,241 to 4,782,978). Future work focuses on refining this data set and developing and fostering international support and broader collaboration, capitalising amongst different initiatives in various fora, for example, OECD's work on bilateral trade asymmetry or bilateral contacts with national data compilers (statistical offices and central banks).