Estimates of Ad Valorem Equivalents of Barriers Against Foreign Suppliers of Services in Eleven Services Sectors and 103 Countries

Abstract

A new database on the barriers faced by foreign suppliers of services has been produced by the World Bank. Data for 103 countries are available on eleven of the most important services sectors in international trade. To date, however, these data have not been converted into ad valorem equivalents. Based on these data, and building on the methodology and publications supported by the Australian Productivity Commission, we produce estimates of the ad valorem equivalents of the barriers for all these sectors and countries. Compared with estimates available in the literature that are based on assessments of country and sector‐specific barriers to services providers, our estimates expand the set of sectors and more than triple the set of countries for which estimates of the ad valorem equivalents of the services barriers are available.

Stopped TTIP? Its potential impact on the world and the role of neglected FDI

“…Finally, the last four columns of Table 1 display the "Barriers to FDI" in advanced business services, since they are not available for the rest 5 . Jafari and Tarr (2015) have recently estimated these barriers that foreign firms face when they enter markets abroad. For the provision of services across borders, the physical presence of firms (i.e., the operations of affiliates) seems more important than in the case of manufacturing goods.…”

“…By contrast, in this paper the results obtained from the different components of the TTIP are fully comparable since they are all derived within the same CGE model. In a latter paper using the same Francois et al (2013) model and also the database from Jafari and Tarr (2015), NTBs faced by trade (not by foreign affiliates sales which are absent in the model) are cut by 50%, with the only exception of Finance and Insurance for which there are no reductions at all.…”

Reflections on the Economic Modelling of Free Trade Agreements

“…They review the literature 32 The authors are mentioned in Jafari and Tarr (2014), Section 2.4. 33 It is noteworthy that there is only weak correlation between the Jafari and Tarr (2014) and the Fontagné et al (2016) AVEs for e.g.…”

Pulling back the curtain on 'behind the border' trade costs: The case of EU-US agri-food trade

“…The residual approach has been more extensively applied in services sectors (e.g., Park, 2002;Francois et al, 2005;Guillin, 2013), as the direct method requires extensive databases on regulatory regimes on services which have not, hitherto, been available (Jafari & Tarr, 2014). On the other hand, in the area of merchandise trade, this method has been applied to agri-food (Philippidis & Sanjuán, 2007a, 2007b, whilst the IMF (2002) have used this same approach to estimate the trade restricting effect of all non-tariff barriers in order to calculate 'trade potentials' for certain groups of countries.…”