Valuing Services in Trade: A Toolkit for Competitiveness Diagnostics

Abstract

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The Impact of Services on Economic Complexity: Service Sophistication as Route for Economic Growth

“…In this context, our results suggest that probably the easiest way for maintaining the effect of the evolution of the productive structure is by introducing services whose set of required capabilities is similar, but a little more complex; for instance, developing intangible assets such as patents requires the presence of sophisticated machineries and an additional input of capabilities. It is worth noting that our argument is in accordance with the conclusions in [18] where it was indicated that services tend to grow in importance for the economy as the level of a country’s development rises.…”

“…Nevertheless, since the nature of the trade in services makes it difficult to collect service data as accurately as goods data, it includes data mainly on two out of the four modes of trade in services; cross-border trade flows and consumption abroad. A detailed description of the construction of the dataset is provided in Appendix B of [18]. …”

Trade in services: Opening markets to create opportunities

“…An increasing number of studies and reports have analysed the role of services trade and related policies from an economic development perspective (see for instance Mattoo and Payton 2007;Cali et al 2008;World Bank 2010;Saez et al 2015;Dihel and Goswami 2016;Balchin et al 2016), complementing studies of developed economies (e.g. Breinlich and Criscuolo 2011;Wagner 2012).…”

“…Of course, more than an open trade regime and good economic governance will be needed to support competitive local services sectors and generate positive productivity effects. Services are relatively intensive in human capital, so it is important to have sufficiently high-quality educational services at primary, secondary, and, as it becomes appropriate, tertiary level (Saez et al 2015) so as to ensure that workers have the skills demanded by service suppliers in areas such as ICT, finance, and business and professional services (Dihel et al 2010). A supportive regulatory regime is also important, which, as discussed below, calls for mechanisms to allow for interactions with services firms and users of services (Dihel and Goswami 2016).…”

“…Dihel and Goswami (2016) provide a number of excellent case studies and informed discussion of trade in services in Africa. See alsoCattaneo et al (2010),Saez et al (2015), andBalchin et al (2016).…”