instance, the requirement that foreign providers completely re-do the university degree, practice and exam in the domestic country) as well as the administrative, financial and economic costs of compliance with such measures (e.g. the costs of applying for a business visa). While minimizing the latter costs forms an obvious part of a trade facilitation in services (TFiS) agenda on Mode 4, eliminating excessively burdensome regulation or at least making it less onerous is more of a trade liberalization agenda. Meanwhile, another key issue in a Mode 4 TFiS agenda is reducing the heterogeneity in necessary regulation and the administration of regulatory measures, though regulatory heterogeneity also imposes trade costs on suppliers, accounting for 21 percent of total trade costs in services along with trade policy barriers (WTO, 2019). Finally, the emphasis should be on the extent to which a TFiS agenda can enhance predictability and certainty for service suppliers, since both these attributes reduce services trade costs. According to WTO (2019), information- and transaction-related costs form the largest component of bilateral trade costs, accounting for 25 percent of total services trade costs.

The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 conceptualizes a TFiS agenda as it would apply to Mode 4 trade. Section 3 discusses costs of restrictive barriers to Mode 4 trade by providing an analysis of the OECD’s STRI data on MNP. Section 4 provides suggestions on facilitating Mode 4 trade by drawing on the OECD’s STRI data on regulatory transparency applicable to MNP. Section 5 concludes.

# **2. Conceptualizing a TFiS agenda for Mode 4**

In trying to conceptualize a TFiS agenda on MNP, which is the main objective of this paper, it is useful to clarify at the outset what constitutes services trade facilitation in Mode 4 and what does not (see Table 1 for examples). The distinction in this context is between liberalizing regulation that may be unnecessarily restrictive or burdensome and which can be streamlined, if not eliminated in its entirety, and between facilitating complying with regulation that may be necessary. Illustratively, suggestions for eliminating or easing regulations (e.g. the requirement for professionals to retrain in-country and get local qualifications) are more likely classified as services trade liberalization issues rather than trade facilitation. In contrast, suggestions for reducing visa fees; reducing the number of documents needed to get a visa; streamlining processing times; allowing for multiple entry visas etc. fall under the rubric of trade facilitation. While the focus of this paper is on trade facilitation (see Section 4 for details), it also provides an analysis of services trade barriers vis-à-vis Mode 4 as contained in the OECD STRI database (see Section 3 for details) for comparison. The analysis of services trade barriers outlined in Section 3 is also warranted by the fact that the distinction between trade cost and trade facilitation measures is not always watertight. For instance, while reducing heterogeneity in regulation clearly forms a part of a possible TFiS agenda, regulatory heterogeneity also imposes significant trade costs on suppliers, accounting for 21 percent of total trade costs in services along with trade policy barriers (WTO, 2019). We thus provide an analysis of predominantly trade cost measures from the OECD STRI database in Section 3 followed by an analysis of largely trade facilitation measures using the same data source in Section 4, while acknowledging links between the two.

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