IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/oec/traaab/238-en.html

The costs of regulatory barriers to trade in services: New estimates of ad valorem tariff equivalents

Author

Listed:
  • Sebastian Benz

    (OECD)

  • Alexander Jaax

    (OECD)

Abstract

This paper presents new estimates of policy-induced trade costs in five services sectors for 46 countries. Results demonstrate the significant untapped economic potential of multilateral, plurilateral, and unilateral services trade liberalisation. Even though services trade has more than tripled in the last two decades, the results show that trade costs are still high. The results are not only interesting in and of themselves, but they can also be used as input for further analysis on the economic benefits from different scenarios regarding the dismantling of barriers to trade in services. This paper exploits recent advances related to the measurement of services barriers in the OECD Services Trade Restrictiveness Index (STRI).

Suggested Citation

  • Sebastian Benz & Alexander Jaax, 2020. "The costs of regulatory barriers to trade in services: New estimates of ad valorem tariff equivalents," OECD Trade Policy Papers 238, OECD Publishing.
    • Handle: RePEc:oec:traaab:238-en
    DOI: 10.1787/bae97f98-en
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Xin Fu & Tangyou Wang & Hongxu Yang, 2023. "Does Service Trade Liberalization Promote Service Productivity? Evidence from China," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(8), pages 1-22, April.
    2. Tamar Khachaturian & Sarah Oliver, 2023. "Intangible trade: Understanding the relationship between trade barriers and mode of supply in services sectors," The World Economy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 46(5), pages 1189-1234, May.
    3. Camille Reverdy, 2023. "Estimating the general equilibrium effects of services trade liberalization," Review of International Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 31(2), pages 493-521, May.
    4. Richard Baldwin & Rebecca Freeman & Angelos Theodorakopoulos, 2024. "Deconstructing Deglobalization: The Future of Trade is in Intermediate Services," Asian Economic Policy Review, Japan Center for Economic Research, vol. 19(1), pages 18-37, January.
    5. Anirudh Shingal, 2022. "COVID‐19, services trade and greenfield investment in ASEAN+6," The World Economy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 45(10), pages 3146-3168, October.
    6. Bekkers, Eddy & Lopez Gonzalez, Javier & So, Roger, 2025. "Great expectations: Quantifying the potential economic impact of the WTO Agreement on E-commerce," WTO Staff Working Papers ERSD-2025-06, World Trade Organization (WTO), Economic Research and Statistics Division.
    7. Alexander Jaax & Sébastien Miroudot, 2021. "Capturing value in GVCs through intangible assets: The role of the trade–investment–intellectual property nexus," Journal of International Business Policy, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 4(3), pages 433-452, September.
    8. Satoshi Nakano & Kazuhiko Nishimura, 2023. "How do we measure trade elasticity for services?," Papers 2401.08594, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2024.
    9. González, Javier & Latorre, María C. & Valverde, Gabriela Ortiz, 2022. "A comprehensive short and long-run assessment on the impact of the EU-Mercosur agreement on Brazil," Conference papers 333391, Purdue University, Center for Global Trade Analysis, Global Trade Analysis Project.
    10. Widyastutik & Birka Septy Meliany & Syarifah Amaliah & Hotsawadi & Amzul Rifin, 2025. "Linking Global CGE Models and Sectoral Analysis to Evaluate the Impact of Trade Openness in Service Sector Towards Indonesia Agricultural and Agroindustry," Economies, MDPI, vol. 13(7), pages 1-18, July.
    11. Métivier, Jeanne & Bacchetta, Marc & Bekkers, Eddy & Koopman, Robert, 2023. "International trade cooperation’s impact on the world economy," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 45(4), pages 713-744.
    12. Saban Nazlioglu & Cagin Karul, 2024. "Testing for Granger causality in heterogeneous panels with cross-sectional dependence," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 67(4), pages 1541-1579, October.
    13. Gonzalez Cabrera, Carlos Javier & Latorre, María C. & Ortiz Valverde, Gabriela, 2020. "A Computable General Equilibrium Model (CGE) assessment of the short and long-run impact on Brazil of the European Union – Mercosur Trade Agreement," Conference papers 333242, Purdue University, Center for Global Trade Analysis, Global Trade Analysis Project.
    14. Michael Pfaffermayr, 2023. "Cross‐sectional Gravity Models, PPML Estimation, and the Bias Correction of the Two‐Way Cluster‐Robust Standard Errors," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 85(5), pages 1111-1134, October.
    15. Sebastian Benz & Janos Ferencz & Hildegunn K. Nordås, 2020. "Regulatory barriers to trade in services: A new database and composite indices," The World Economy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 43(11), pages 2860-2879, November.
    16. Bekkers, Eddy & Jhunjhunwala, Kirti & Metivier, Jeanne & Stolzenburg, Victor & Yilmaz, Ayse Nihal, 2025. "Trade policy bias and the gender wage gap," WTO Staff Working Papers ERSD-2025-05, World Trade Organization (WTO), Economic Research and Statistics Division.
    17. Lukman OYELAMI & Amara ZONGO, 2022. "Modeling the Impact of Non-Tariff Barriers in Services on Intra-African Trade: Global Trade Analysis Project Model," Bordeaux Economics Working Papers 2022-08, Bordeaux School of Economics (BSE).
    18. Anirudh Shingal, 2023. "Mode 4 restrictiveness and services trade," Review of World Economics (Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv), Springer;Institut für Weltwirtschaft (Kiel Institute for the World Economy), vol. 159(3), pages 757-786, August.
    19. Latorre, Maria C. & Yonezawa, Hidemichi & Olekseyuk, Zoryana, 2022. "The EU-Mercosur agreement: An in-depth analysis of CO2 emissions and labor market results," Conference papers 333488, Purdue University, Center for Global Trade Analysis, Global Trade Analysis Project.
    20. Gustavo de Souza, 2025. "Artificial Intelligence in the Office and the Factory: Evidence from Administrative Software Registry Data," Working Paper Series WP 2025-11, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
    21. Métivier, Jeanne & Bacchetta, Marc & Bekkers, Eddy & Koopman, Robert Bernard, 2023. "International trade cooperation's impact on the world economy," WTO Staff Working Papers ERSD-2023-02, World Trade Organization (WTO), Economic Research and Statistics Division.
    22. So, Roger Yu & Bekkers, Eddy, 2024. "The trade effects of a new agreement on services domestic regulation," WTO Staff Working Papers ERSD-2024-02, World Trade Organization (WTO), Economic Research and Statistics Division.
    23. Saad Ahmad & Jeffrey Bergstrand & Jordi Paniagua & Heather Wickramarachi, 2025. "The Multinational Revenue, Employment, and Investment Database (MREID)," Review of International Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 33(4), pages 817-836, September.
    24. Zhuoran Bai & Shuang Meng & Zhuang Miao & Yan Zhang, 2023. "Liberalization for services foreign direct investment and product mix adjustment: Evidence from Chinese exporting firms," Review of International Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 31(2), pages 363-388, May.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • F68 - International Economics - - Economic Impacts of Globalization - - - Policy
    • F15 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Economic Integration
    • F14 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Empirical Studies of Trade
    • F13 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Trade Policy; International Trade Organizations

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oec:traaab:238-en. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/tdoecfr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.