Policy restrictions and services performance: Evidence from 32 countries

Xiaobo He and Christopher Findlay ()
Additional contact information
Christopher Findlay: Faculty of the Professions, University of Adelaide, Adelaide SA 5005, Australia

Journal of International Commerce, Economics and Policy (JICEP), 2014, vol. 05, issue 01, 1-19

Abstract: The impact of services trade and investment policy which affects the performance of the service sector is the topic of this paper. The performance indicator is not the services share of total output but the services shares in the gross value of goods exports. We find that a more restrictive environment for services delivery is associated with a lower services share in exports, but with a diminishing effect. The results remain robust even after extra measures of the ease of doing business (such as number of documents to export, number of days to export and "rank of trading across borders") are included. There is a significant relationship between policy and the share of services from domestic origin, including those from foreign invested firms, in exports, but not with the share of services from offshore sources. This result indicates that at present the more important impact of services policy reforms is via the establishment of new providers, rather than via trade across borders. This causal channel has important consequences for the political economy of reforms in services.

Keywords: Services trade restrictiveness index (STRI); trade in valueadded (TiVA); OECD; developing countries; F13; F14; F60 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S1793993314400031
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:jicepx:v:05:y:2014:i:01:n:s1793993314400031

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S1793993314400031

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of International Commerce, Economics and Policy (JICEP) is currently edited by Ramkishen S. Rajan

More articles in Journal of International Commerce, Economics and Policy (JICEP) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().