1 Sources: World Development Indicators (World Bank), ILOSTAT (International Labour Organization) and OECD FDI statistics. 2 A few previous attempts have been made at creating internationally comparable indices on services trade restrictions, but with limited country and sector coverage, and/or based on less reliable survey methods or on GATS commitments rather than current legal texts. A recent World Bank project offers services trade restrictiveness indices for a large number of countries in some of the sectors covered by the OECD STRI. See Borchert et al. (2012). 3 The country and sector coverage of the STRI database is listed in Tables A1 and A2. The paper is organised as follows. Section 2 presents the STRI indices and descriptive evidence of how they relate to performance in several services sectors. Section 3 builds on the gravity framework to estimate the relationship between services trade restrictions, imports and exports of the services in question. Section 4 introduces a bilateral measure of regulatory differences and analyses the interplay between the impact of regulatory coherence and that of services trade liberalisation. Section 5 concludes. SERVICES TRADE RESTRICTIVENESS AND SERVICES SECTOR PERFORMANCERestrictions on market access for foreign services providers protect local firms from competitive pressure. The STRI also covers behind the border barriers to competition and burdensome regulatory procedures and processes, which affect local and foreign firms alike. Therefore, a high score on the STRI is expected to have a negative impact on the performance of the sector in question.Looking first at the STRI indicators by sector, what is most striking is the large dispersion in regulatory restrictiveness both within and between sectors. Figure 1 shows the average, minimum and maximum index values for each of the 22 sectors included in the database. Three sectors stand out as having the highest average levels of restrictiveness: air transport, legal services and accounting and auditing services. At the other end of the scale, few restrictions are recorded on average in distribution, freight forwarding and road transport services. Yet in all sectors there is a large gap between the highest and the lowest score, suggesting that the index does capture meaningful differences in regulatory regimes across countries. This variation is expected to affect performance measures such the development of the services sectors in question or the efficiency of service 0 Note: The indices cover 42 countries except landlocked countries for maritime transport and Iceland and Colombia for rail transport. Air transport and road freight cover only commercial establishment (with accompanying movement of people).Source: OECD Services Trade Restrictiveness database. Note:Low STRI represents values from the lowest score to the mean minus 0.5 SDs. Medium STRI ranges between the upper limit of the low category to the mean plus 0.5 SDs. High STRI ranges from the upper limit of the medium to the highest score.Source: OECD STRI da...
This document and any map included herein are without prejudice to the status of or sovereignty over any territory, to the delimitation of international frontiers and boundaries and to the name of any territory, city or area.
Using data from the last 150 years in a small set of countries, and from the postwar period in a large set of countries, we show that large investments in state primary education systems tend to occur when countries face military rivals or threats from their neighbors. By contrast, we find that democratic transitions are negatively associated with education investments, while the presence of democratic political institutions magnifies the positive effect of military rivalries. These empirical results are robust to a number of statistical concerns and continue to hold when we instrument military rivalries with commodity prices or rivalries in a certain country's immediate neighborhood. We also present historical case studies, as well as a simple model, that are consistent with the econometric evidence. * We thank Xavier Jaravel for superb research assistance. We are also grateful to Tim Besley, Nick Bloom, Jim Fearon, Claudia Goldin, Elhanan Helpman, Kalina Manova, Nathan Nunn, and Francesco Trebbi for help and suggestions, and to seminar participants at Harvard, Brown, Stanford GSB, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) program meeting for useful comments. Financial support from the ERC and the Torsten and Ragnar Söcerberg Foundations is gratefully acknowledged.
Using data from the last 150 years in a small set of countries, and from the postwar period in a large set of countries, we show that large investments in state primary education systems tend to occur when countries face military rivals or threats from their neighbors. By contrast, we find that democratic transitions are negatively associated with education investments, while the presence of democratic political institutions magnifies the positive effect of military rivalries. These empirical results are robust to a number of statistical concerns and continue to hold when we instrument military rivalries with commodity prices or rivalries in a certain country's immediate neighborhood. We also present historical case studies, as well as a simple model, that are consistent with the econometric evidence. * We thank Xavier Jaravel for superb research assistance. We are also grateful to Tim Besley, Nick Bloom, Jim Fearon, Claudia Goldin, Elhanan Helpman, Kalina Manova, Nathan Nunn, and Francesco Trebbi for help and suggestions, and to seminar participants at Harvard, Brown, Stanford GSB, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) program meeting for useful comments. Financial support from the ERC and the Torsten and Ragnar Söcerberg Foundations is gratefully acknowledged.
The OECD Trade Policy Paper series is designed to make available to a wide readership selected studies by OECD staff or by outside consultants. This series continues that originally entitled OECD Trade Policy Working Papers. This paper is published under the responsibility of the Secretary-General of the OECD. The opinions expressed and the arguments employed herein do not necessarily reflect the official views of OECD member countries. The publication of this document has been authorised by Ken Ash, Director of the Trade and Agriculture Directorate This document and any map included herein are without prejudice to the status of or sovereignty over any territory, to the delimitation of international frontiers and boundaries and to the name of any territory, city or area.
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