# **1  INTRODUCTION**

Compared to the vast empirical literature on policies affecting trade in goods, the empirical analysis of services trade policy is still in its infancy.<sup>3</sup> A major constraint has been inadequate data on policies affecting services trade. Significant progress has been made over the last decade, at the World Bank and the OECD, in developing cross-country databases on services regulations and policies, and methods to quantify them.

This paper describes a new initiative: the Services Trade Policy Database (STPD) developed jointly by the World Bank and the WTO Secretariat. The Database contains comparable information for 68 economies on services trade policy in five main services sectors – financial services, telecommunications, distribution, transportation, and professional services – further broken down into 23 subsectors. It is based on a new comprehensive classification of services trade policies jointly developed by the World Bank and the WTO Secretariat, consistent with both the past World Bank classification and the recent OECD classification. Hence, it offers recent information comparable across a large number of developing and industrial economies and backwards compatible with information for the years 2008-11 in the previous World Bank database.

The difficulty in creating such a database is well known but the task has large potential benefits. Our main reason for presenting a product that is inevitably imperfect and still a work-in-progress is to enhance policy transparency and to facilitate further research in this important area. Even in its present form, we see this Services Trade Policy Database as playing an important role: in advancing policy reform by facilitating the analysis of services policies; in informing international negotiations by providing data on actual policies; in assisting businesses by creating a first port-of-call for information on the state of access to markets; and in fostering dialogue among relevant stakeholders by making information on policies publicly available. We see this database as providing not a definitive picture of services trade policy, but a step in enhancing the availability of information which might hopefully evolve – through feedback from various interested parties –into a collectively created public good.

The paper describes, in Section 2, the scope of the data, the structure of the Database, the data collection process, and compares this new endeavor with other databases. Section 3 describes the Services Trade Restrictions Index (STRI), which builds on the previous World Bank STRI, and Section 4 presents the Services Trade Policy Database (STPD), which is accessible through the WTO’s Integrated Trade Intelligence Portal (I-TIP) interface. The final section discusses implications for future work, including within the overall joint project between the World Bank and the WTO Secretariat.

# **2  SERVICES TRADE POLICY DATA**

# **Scope and organization of the database**

# _Scope and definition_

Trade in services is defined, as is now customary, to include the supply of a service through various modes: on a cross-border basis, through establishing a commercial presence, or through the presence of a natural person.<sup>4</sup> Accordingly, the Services Trade Policy Database (STPD) contains information on policies and regulations that affect international trade in services across all these modes of supply.

We consider policies and regulations applied by the importing/'host' economy (i.e. the jurisdiction where the services consumer is located), which affect the ability of foreign suppliers to supply

> 3 For various examples of studies on the impact of services trade policies, see Borchert et al. (2017); Deardorff and Stern (2008); Findlay and Warren (2010); Fink et al. (2001, 2002); Francois and Wooton (2008); Gönenc and Nicoletti (2000); and Mattoo and Payton (2007).

> 4 While we do not cover, strictly speaking, "consumption abroad", a mode of delivery that is particularly important in services like tourism, education and health – sectors not covered by the database – we take in fact a broad view of 'cross-border supply', covering measures that apply directly to the consumer, such as the ability to make cross-border payments.

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