the countries at the end of 2015.<sup>10</sup> For the OECD countries, we relied on publicly available information and policy information from the OECD STRI database (Geloso Grosso et al., 2015).

This paper focuses on five major services sectors and modes, covered by the Database. The five major services sectors are disaggregated into further subsector-modes (as shown in Annex Table 1): financial (banking and insurance), telecommunications, retail distribution, transportation (international maritime shipping, maritime auxiliary, road freight, and rail freight services) and professional services (accounting, auditing and legal). Within each subsector, the database covers the most relevant modes of supplying the respective service: establishing commercial presence or FDI (mode 3 in WTO parlance) in every subsector; cross-border trade in services (mode 1) in financial, transportation and some professional services; and the presence of service supplying individuals (mode 4) in professional services.

Among the TPP countries, there are 29 regional and bilateral trade agreements with services components. Among the 66 country pairs within the TPP region, 43 country pairs have PTAs covering services (Annex Table 2). Chile has the most number of PTAs (with all 11 TPP partners), while Canada has only four PTAs (with the US, Mexico, Peru and Chile). We reviewed these agreements and their annexes for reservations made for the 27 sub-sector modes covered by the database (for the sector list see Annex Table 1). For each subsector-mode, we identified the measures and commitments made under the PTAs, and the PTA with the most open regime was used as the benchmark.<sup>11</sup> It is hard to measure precisely policies affecting services trade because of their variety and complexity (see, for example, Hoekman (1996) and the overview by Deardoff and Stern (2008)). We rely on a measure of the restrictiveness of a country’s policy regime for any subsector-mode, the “services trade restrictions index” (STRI), which has the weakness of being subjective but the virtue of being simple, transparent and robust (Borchert et al. 2014). This measure is most convenient to depict broad patterns in policy, across countries, modes, and sectors. Essentially, we assess policy regimes in their entirety and assign them into five broad categories: completely open, i.e. no restrictions at all; completely closed, i.e. no entry allowed at all; virtually open but with minor restrictions; virtually closed but with very limited opportunities to enter and operate; and a final residual “intermediate” category of regimes which allow entry and operations but impose restrictions that are neither trivial nor stringent. It is convenient to assign a value to each of these five categories of regimes on an openness scale from 0 to 1 with intervals of 0.25. We call the resulting score a services trade restrictions index (STRI). Once a score has been attached to each regime, STRI values can be aggregated across sectors and modes of supply taking weighted averages which reflect the importance of the different modes in each sector and the individual sectors in a standardized country. Details of the quantification method are provided in Annex Tables A -8 and A- 9 and Borchert et al (2014).

> number of countries at the end of 2015 in order to compare the TPP commitments with the most recent applied policy information.

> 10 The information was updated for Vietnam, Malaysia, Mexico and Chile.

> 11 For GATS commitments and PTAs that use a positive listing approach (e.g. ASEAN Framework Agreement in Services), if a certain sector is not included, we consider it “unbound” and a score of 1 was assigned. For PTAs that use a negative listing approach, if a certain sector-mode is not listed in the reservations list, we consider the sector completely open and a score of 0 was assigned.

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