analogous to the database on bound tariffs in the context of goods trade. With the rapid increase of regional and bilateral agreements by some WTO Members in which commitments were closer to applied policies, new data sets were built which provided a better sense of the policies at the time these agreements were signed. However, unlike the applied tariffs database that accompanied the bound tariffs database, no database was initially available on services applied policies.

Prior to 2008, information on applied services trade policies could be found in national (e.g. US International Trade Commission), regional (APEC STAR database), supranational (European Commission) or international databases (e.g. UNCTAD or OECD databases on investment policies).<sup>13</sup> Some information could also be gathered from the WTO's trade policy reviews. However, these sources only provided a partial picture, in terms of the type of information, and the economies, sectors and modes covered.

It was only in 2008 that the World Bank went a step further by collecting and compiling information on applied services policies (Borchert et al., 2012, 2014). The World Bank released its Services Trade Restrictions Database in 2012, presenting data on applied measures for 103 economies and 5 main sectors (financial services, telecommunications, retail trade services, transportation and professional services), which were further broken down into 19 subsectors.<sup>14</sup> Data mainly referred to the year 2008, with data for a number of economies updated in 2011. The database presented 4 tabs reflecting the STRI, the key restrictions, the main policy measures and policy measures at the most detailed level collected in the questionnaire. The last tab included information that was broken down into 9 categories of policy measures, namely Sector openness, Forms of entry, Licensing, Operations, Regulatory Environment, Conditions of provision of service, Restrictions on service providers, Type of entry and Entry condition.

The OECD developed a regulatory database as a basis for its own STRI, which was publicly released in 2014 (OECD, 2015, 2017).<sup>15</sup> The database currently includes information on the 36 OECD members, as well as 9 non-OECD economies (Brazil, China, Colombia, Costa Rica (since 2017), India, Indonesia, Malaysia (since 2018), the Russian Federation and South Africa, respectively). Measures for 22 sectors are presented, organized according to five policy areas (Restrictions on foreign ownership and other market entry conditions, Restrictions on the movement of people, Other discriminatory measures and international standards, Barriers to competition and public ownership, and Regulatory transparency and administrative requirements). The database has been updated annually since 2014.

In 2013, the World Bank and the WTO Secretariat started the development of a WTO-World Bank Services Trade Policy Database (STPD), which is disseminated through the I-TIP services portal.<sup>16</sup> For further information on the actual database and its functionalities, please refer to section 4 below.<sup>17</sup>

# **3  MEASURING SERVICES TRADE POLICY RESTRICTIVENESS**

It is notoriously difficult to measure policies affecting services trade because of their variety and complexity (see, for example, Hoekman (1996) and the overview by Deardorff and Stern (2008)).

> 13 See https://www.usitc.gov/, <u>http://www.servicestradeforum.org/, http://madb.europa.eu/madb/barriers_crossTables.htm, https://investmentpolicyhub.unctad.org/</u> and <u>http://www.oecd.org/investment/fdiindex.htm. See also Golub (2009); and Reisman and Vu (2012).</u>

> 14 <u>https://www.worldbank.org/en/research/brief/services-trade-restrictions-database</u>

> 15 - <u>http://www.oecd.org/trade/topics/services trade/</u>

> 16 In 2013, the World Bank and the WTO signed a Memorandum of Understanding concerning the establishment a unique database on services policies, covering commitments taken by WTO Members in various agreements, applied regimes and services statistics. This cooperation between the two organizations materialized in I-TIP Services, the services component of the Integrated Trade Intelligence Portal (I-TIP), which was released in 2013. The main objective of the integrated database is to make it easier for WTO Members and other stakeholders to access the various types of information relevant for services trade policymaking, see http://i-tip.wto.org/services/default.aspx.

> 17 I-TIP Services offers information on trade in services policies for a large sample of economies spanning all income groups. In its four modules (GATS, RTA Commitments, Services Trade Policy Database (STPD), and Statistics), the integrated database permits searches by economy (mainly WTO Members), subsector, agreement, or source of information. Search results are presented in summary form, as well as in more detail. Search results can be filtered using a number of additional criteria. Further, users can easily switch from one module to another, for example from looking at a particular economy's WTO commitments in a given subsector, to relevant commitments in RTAs, and then to applied policies and related services statistics.

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