are compounded when importing countries do not entertain visa extensions or do not grant multiple-entry visas.

Thus, while all 45 sample countries in the OECD STRI database except Russia allowed multiple-entry to business visitors in the year 2017, this was not found to be the case for aircrew, seamen and truck drivers (the latter are the most adversely affected with 9 of the 45 countries – Costa Rica, Greece, Iceland, Korea, Lithuania, Mexico, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States - not allowing them any multiple-entry in the year 2017). Likewise, only four countries (Canada, Denmark, Indonesia and Japan) provided visas on arrival or exempted visas for temporary entry/transit of crew across services sectors. Most of the other countries are found to be rather restrictive along this dimension, with six countries (China, Ireland, Russia, South Africa, Turkey and the United States) being completely restrictive across all sectors.

Moving towards multiple-entry visas for service providers in all sectors, providing opportunities for e-visas/visas on arrival and/or exempting visas for temporary entry/transit of service providers should all be a part of a viable MNP TFiS agenda. In fact, one notable development in facilitating visas for business professionals is the relatively recent good practice of enabling e-business visas (see Box 1 for details on the Indian e-business visa). Similarly, the Italian Embassy in Riyadh and the Italian consulate in Jeddah have introduced a new facilitation mechanism for Saudi businesspersons and investors to facilitate trade and investment between the two countries. Specifically, applicants who have a "declaration of invitation" from a firm operating in Italy are exempted from submitting certain supporting documents, including proof of the objectives of the journey and "the condition of economiccommercial operator" (Attström et al. 2013).

# **Box 1: India’s e-business visa program**

In November 2014, the Government of India introduced an online tourist Visa (e-Visa) for 43 countries. In 2015, India rolled out the e-Visa program to other major world countries. In April 2017, India retooled its e-Visa program, introducing a special visa subcategory for business travelers.

At present, business travelers from more than 160 countries can apply for a business e- Visa. Travelers who use India’s business e-Visa program apply, pay a fee online and receive their electronic visa online before traveling to India. The process has hugely simplified the visa application process for business travelers.

For more details see https://www.evisaindia.org/types/business-visa/.

Finally, it is interesting to note that there is little, if any, statistical correlation between the various attributes of business visa applications discussed in this section, as can be seen from Table 6, which further highlights the elements of discretion and heterogeneity in the determination of these attributes by the imposing jurisdictions. In fact, while there is some correlation between the average MNP restrictiveness score, the duration of visa for crew and the number of documents needed to obtain a business visa, the signs of the statistical correlations are found to be counter-intuitive in each case. For instance, one would expect countries with more restrictive policies towards MNP to require more documents to apply for 13