Given that regulatory governance has been identified in the literature as a key enabling factor for services trade (Saez et al., 2015), which also comes out in our previous section, we first discus this policy area. All variables discussed are country-wide and cover all sectors in the economy.

A first relevant source that records measures at country-wide level is on the quality and good regulatory practices from the World Bank’s **_Regulatory Governance_** database. This database records measures of transparency, civic participation, and government accountability across the life cycle of regulations of the entire economy. Given that the majority of most countries’ economies is comprised of services, this seems an important indicator. The explanatory note of this database uses concepts that come back under the key-words reported in the previous section such as meaningful transparency, effective market access and good regulatory practices. As well, the database explores how policy makers interact with stakeholders when shaping regulations affecting business communities, an element that was found of importance as described above in terms of operationalizing transparency with businesses.

The Regulatory Governance index includes the following main components on which the scores are based, namely **(1) Transparency of rulemaking; (2) Public consultation in rulemaking; (3) Impact assessment; (4) Ex post review; (5) Accessing laws and regulations; and (6) Challenging regulations** . All six categories seem important as all items deal with transparency that goes beyond the mere fact of transparency itself and that of effectively operationalizing it, such as allowing for public consultation in the rule making by requesting comments from the public, evaluating regulations by impact assessments, providing ex post reviews and conducting a regular review of the regulation.<sup>8</sup> A second useful database is the World Bank’s **_Doing Business_** database. This well-known database provides objective measures of business regulations in 12 areas. Some of the areas record regulations of a specific sector such as construction (which in our case seems less relevant as measures need to remain economy-wide), but most of them are country-broad regulations targeting the entire economy of setting up a business. For our categorization of TFiS measures based on the discussion in the previous section, only three areas would be relevant, namely **(a) Protecting minority investors** ; **(b) Enforcing contracts** ; and possibly **(c) Resolving insolvency** .<sup>9</sup> In large part, all three areas are related to investment measures and they can therefore be considered as mode-specific with respect to trade in services through Mode 3. In fact, the three sub-indexes measure businesses’ access to government institutions to solve investor and other contractual issues.

In particular the sub-components of the indicators of Protecting minority investors (i.e. **a** ) and Enforcing contracts (i.e. **b** ) coincide with the issues that are important for TFiS. They range from resolving issues of dispute, the use of good practices, dispute prevention and resolution, and investor-related services. Regarding this latter point, to some extent the area of Resolving insolvency (i.e. **c** ) can also be considered as relevant here. This category measures the cost and outcome of insolvency proceedings involving domestic entities as well as the strength of the legal framework applicable to judicial liquidation and

> 8 In a recently conducted survey by the World Bank among foreign direct investors, 86 percent find the legal and regulatory environment important or critically important for their investment decisions (World Bank, 2018).

> 9 Note that other areas of the Doing Business database are more sector-specific in nature such as “Dealing with construction permits”, “Getting credit” (i.e. banking services), “Registering property” (i.e. government services), and “Getting electricity”. Other country-broad areas are “Starting a business”, “Paying taxes”, and “Trading across borders”, which are either relevant for trade in goods or setting up a business and not necessarily to trade although some measures under “Starting a business” are also covered under the OECD STRI (see below).

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