Guide to the Services Trade Restrictions Database

Abstract

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

Winners and Losers of Globalization: Sixteen Challenges for Measurement and Theory

“…Firm-level data on services trade are available for more and more countries. Information on barriers to services trade are summarized in two largescale projects, the World Bank's Services Trade Restrictions Database (World Bank, 2015, Borchert et al, 2012a and the OECD's Services Trade Restrictiveness Index (OECD, 2015). Nevertheless, there is still a lot to be done in the future to build and maintain comprehensive and reliable databases in this field.…”

Policy restrictions and services performance: Evidence from 32 countries

“…The Services Trade Restrictions (STR) Database which contains information from 103 countries, of which 24 are Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries and 79 are non-OECD, was initiated by the World Bank in 2008 (Borchert et al, 2012). It covers five main services sectors such as professional services (accounting and legal), financial services (banking and insurance), retail distribution, telecommunications and transportation (Borchert et al, 2012).…”

“…It covers five main services sectors such as professional services (accounting and legal), financial services (banking and insurance), retail distribution, telecommunications and transportation (Borchert et al, 2012). As discussed in Francois and Hoekman (2010), in assessing services policy it is important to take account of different modes of supply.…”

“…As discussed in Francois and Hoekman (2010), in assessing services policy it is important to take account of different modes of supply. The STR database thus refers to three different modes, namely (i) cross-border supply of services, (ii) the supply of services through commercial presence and (iii) the temporary presence of natural persons (Borchert et al, 2012). More detailed information on the database and descriptive statistics can be found in Borchert et al (2012) and (2013), respectively.…”

Services Trade Restrictiveness Index (STRI): Telecommunication Services

“…A number of institutions, including the OECD (Dihel and Shepherd, 2007) and the World Bank (Borchert et al, 2012) have developed services trade restrictiveness indices since then. However, so far such indices have been published only for one year and for a limited number of countries and sectors.…”