Borchert, Gootiiz and Mattoo (2012) find that “some of the fastest growing countries in Asia and the oil-rich Gulf states have the most restrictive policies in services, whereas some of the poorest countries are remarkably open”. Furthermore, they also find that professional and transportation services are among the most protected in both industrial and developing countries, while retail, telecommunications and even finance tend to be more open. Furthermore, OECD countries are found to restrict transportation services and movement of natural persons as service suppliers.
Below is part of their paper’s abstract:
[..] An illustrative set of results suggests that trade policies matter for investment flows and access to services. In particular, restrictions on foreign acquisitions, discrimination in licensing, restrictions on the repatriation of earnings and lack of legal recourse all have a significant and sizable negative effect, reducing the expected value of sectoral foreign investment by $2.2 billion over a 7-year period, compared with "open" policy regimes. In terms of access to services, credit as a share of gross domestic product is on average 3.3 percentage points lower in countries with major restrictions on the establishment of foreign banks as compared with those that only impose operational restrictions.
The paper comes with Services Trade Restrictions Database (STRD) that provides comparable information in five service sectors, particularly the policies that affect international trade in services (mostly foreign providers):
- Financial services (banking and insurance)
- Telecommunications
- Retail distribution
- Transportation
- Professional services (accounting and legal)
It covers the supply of a service through cross-border delivery (Mode 1), establishing a commercial presence or FDI (Mode 3) and the presence of a natural person (Mode 4). But, it excludes consumption abroad (Mode 2) and subsectors such as business processing services (outsourcing) and policies affecting international movement of less-skilled workers (immigration). They assess policy regimes based on five broad categories:
- completely open, i.e. no restrictions at all
- completely closed, i.e. no entry allowed at all
- virtually open but with minor restrictions
- virtually closed but with very limited opportunities to enter and operate
- middle category of regimes which allows entry and operations but imposes restrictions that are neither trivial nor stringent
Furthermore, they assign a value to each of these five categories of regime on an openness scale from 0 to 100 with intervals of 25 (i.e. completely open gets zero and virtually open gets 25 and so on with 100 for completely closed ) and call the resulting score a STRI (final aggregation is done based on various weights given to each sub-sector depending on the services sectors’ standardized share in total services output for an average ‘industrialized’ country—see p.50, Table A.1). A value of zero indicates the greatest level of openness.
Based on the above methodology (see this paper for full methodology), the table shows how Nepal stands as of now. Based on the scoring method above, judge yourself the extent of ‘openness’ of Nepal’s policies related to services trade. Later on when I have time, I will upload a table showing how Nepal’s score compares with scores of regional economies. Overall, it looks like Nepal is relatively more open in Mode 1 than in other modes of service delivery/trade. A score of 100 indicates that Nepal is completely closing these sectors for trade as per its commitment during WTO accession.
| Services Trade Restrictions Index | ||||
| Nepal | Overall | Mode 1 | Mode 3 | Mode 4 |
| Overall | 42.9 | 36.66 | 42.06 | 85 |
| Financial | 23.2 | 33.5 | 25 | |
| Banking | 23.1 | 12.5 | 25 | |
| Lending by banks | 21.3 | 0 | 25 | |
| Acceptance of deposits by banks | 25 | 25 | 25 | |
| Insurance | 23.3 | 66.67 | 25 | |
| Automobile Insurance | 32.5 | 100 | 25 | |
| Life Insurance | 32.5 | 100 | 25 | |
| Reinsurance | 5 | 0 | 25 | |
| Telecommunications | 50 | 50 | ||
| Fixed-line telecommunications | 50 | 50 | ||
| Mobile telecommunications | 50 | 50 | ||
| Retail | 25 | 25 | ||
| Transportation | 56 | 75 | 48.86 | |
| Air Passenger Domestic | 50 | |||
| Air Passenger International | 63.8 | 75 | 37.5 | |
| Road Freight Domestic | 25 | 25 | ||
| Rail Freight Domestic | 100 | 100 | ||
| Professional | 76 | 33.33 | 75 | 85 |
| Accounting and Auditing | 50 | 50 | 37.5 | 62.5 |
| Accounting | 30 | 0 | 25 | 50 |
| Auditing | 70 | 100 | 50 | 75 |
| Legal | 93.3 | 0 | 100 | 100 |
| Legal Advice Foreign Law | 80 | 0 | 100 | 100 |
| Legal Advice Domestic Law | 100 | 100 | 100 | |
| Legal Representation in Court | 100 | 100 | 100 | |
Here is another paper from the same authors where they look at landlocked countries’ comparative advantage in services trade. They argue that protection of services sector (telecommunications and air transport) by landlocked countries is not a smart policy because it is the one of the few sectors in which they have comparative advantage.They find that even moderate liberalization in these sectors could lead to an increase of cellular subscriptions by 7 percentage points and a 20 percent increase in the number of flights.
For more, see this previous blog post about services trade competitiveness of Nepal. Computing RCA index for Nepal’s exports of each services sector category reveals that Nepal actually enjoys comparative advantage in all of them (this despite the fact that there is trade deficit in three of the six sub-sectors).
| 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | |
| Product name | RCA index | Trade balance (US$ million) | ||||
| Total services | 1.52 | 1.47 | 2.23 | -128.09 | -136.86 | -199.07 |
| Transportation | 0.37 | 0.59 | 0.63 | -304.62 | -233.07 | -241.42 |
| Travel | 4.23 | 5.00 | 4.55 | -45.93 | -20.56 | -58.09 |
| Communications services | 5.59 | 4.54 | 8.62 | 40.91 | 16.11 | 3.13 |
| Insurance services | 0.10 | 0.19 | 0.06 | -29.79 | -25.41 | -29.59 |
| Other business services | 1.11 | 1.31 | 1.87 | -6.41 | 35.79 | 63.25 |
| Government services, n.i.e. | 26.73 | 11.46 | 10.63 | 217.75 | 90.28 | 63.65 |
Source: Author’s computation based on ITC’s Trade Map database.
