Trade in services competitiveness: An assessment methodology

The share of developing countries in exports of world services increased from 15% in 2000 to 21% in 2011. Interestingly, in many of the developing economies, the growth in services exports is derived from not just traditional services, but also from modern, high-value, skill-intensive services. Given the rising importance of services, this paper develops a widely applicable methodology for evaluating the contribution of the service sector and the potential of using the sector for growth, employment and trade diversification objectives. We summarize a few key indicators for assessing the performance of the services sector using the available cross-country and bilateral trade data on the services sector. The indicators proposed in this paper are fairly general and draw on cross-country databases; however, to illustrate the methodology we use examples of the following nine countries: Brazil, Chile, Egypt, Hungary, India, Malaysia, Philippines, South Africa, and Ukraine.